Following on from yesterday’s post about oil’s part in the food chain and potential shortages, the government seems to be getting on the grow your own or buy local bandwagon. In the last couple of days, it’s been gabbing on about Greener Foods, its new micro-site of the enormous governmental behemoth Directgov, which is rapidly subsuming all of the previously discrete departmental sites.

It’s a shame, though, that from what I read it seems to be copping out on several fronts. Drink tap water, it suggests, as it’s 300 times less harmful to the environment than the bottled alternative. Spot on. Try not to waste food, it implores; the average home wastes £424 a year on food that ends up in the bin, gets poured into a landfill and releases methane - a greenhouse gas. Absolutely. Very admirable.

And yet it says very little about setting up your own back-garden smallholding, or restricting your food choices onto to those items grown or bred within 100 miles of your home. This is likely down to perceived responsibilities to the developing world, as the government would be keen to not be seen as discouraging international trade. Particularly with developing nations whose economies rely in part on selling us food that should really be used to feed the local population.

The whole issue seems to have been summarised to a single, easily-missed sentence:

…foods transported by air have much larger climate change effects than foods transported by sea, rail or road…

A clear indication of the reason why non-governmental campaigning and awareness-building organisations, no matter how disparate or disorganised, can sometimes be a more effective and valuable force for good than multi-billion pound governmental departments.