Thanks, this is pretty interesting reading.

You naturally have to make a slew of assumptions in a study of this sort, but some of them just seem a bit off to me. For example, tomatoes look bad because they come from interstate for half the year, ignoring the fact that far fewer fresh tomatoes are actually consumed during that period (because they tend to be more expensive).
Unweighted averages are also used elsewhere when it would be easy to make an intuitive better that nothing guesstimate. Another example - the potato chip company wouldn’t say where they source their potatoes from, so the pre-factory distance was assumed to be zero. Not really much point in calculating the distances to two decimal places when you’re fudging numbers like that. I’m nitpicking though…

I do wonder what the numbers would be for a more typical food basket that I see people buying (i.e. one that contains more processed foods) ? And I’d wager that the energy footprint of our food is actually getting worse – more and more shelf space at the supermarket seems to be devoted to increasingly processed foods these days - a good reason to give this issue a lot more attention.

Phil,

There are some very serious people who disagree completely about the food-mile concept.

Why do you say these guys are wrong?

http://www.world-grain.com/news/newsfinder.asp?Action=UserDisplayFullDoc...

Mr Keene.

He said domestic market demand for grain remained strong during the year and as a result GrainCorp would carry in only 1.2 million tonnes into 2007/08, the lowest level on record.

My Edit-Watch for the ABARE December Quarterly coming out
at anytime. The Ozzie crop will be less than 9 million tonnes and Australia has no buffer stock this year.

Mr Keene said the company's strategic plan was on track, with GrainCorp increasing its domestic market share from 44 per cent to 50 per cent.

where your wheat will be coming from this year:

Kazakhstan-

http://www.world-grain.com/news/newsfinder.asp?Action=UserDisplayFullDoc...

"According to preliminary data, a record harvest of 22.6 million tonnes in initial weight has been reaped this year, which is 22% more than in 2006. We believe the gross harvest of grain in bunker weight should total about 20.1 million tonnes, including 16.6 tonnes of wheat, and the export potential should amount to at least 10 million tonnes," Kurishbayev said at the 2nd Kazakh grain forum in Astana on Thursday.

"Thus, the production of wheat per capita has reached 1,078 kilos, which makes Kazakhstan the world leader in this respect this year ahead of Australia," he said.

http://politics.reddit.com/info/61tk5/comments/

thanks...

Did the authors consider that when a trunk transports an apple, say, they don't have just 1 apple in the truck, but hundreds (or thousands)? For the CO2 emissions, you can't just count the distance traveled, but you have to divide the emissions among every piece of food being transported.

I'm probably wrong, as I can't imagine them making such a ridiculous mistake.

No they did not make a mistake, that is alotta of food miles for one basket of 25 different items, it would also be correct for 1500 of each of those 25 items, assuming your not transporting one apple at a time, yes it is cheaper more economic, but not efficient at all energywise. But if you increase your transportation cost it makes more and more sense to grow closer to home. Also that doesn't mean you still can't export your surplus to other cities with crop failures, they would be willing to pay for the favor I'm sure. In a post-peak economy it's only logical to become more self sufficient because nobody is going to be around to help you much without extremely high cost , i.e. another city/country, because hydrocarbon transportation is unreliable in a post-peak world. Also It's about self sufficiency, food is a requirement for life, you don't let another man keep your manhood 100 miles away at his house, because for some reason it's cheaper. There is the hidden cost of not being self sufficient when you really need to.

Perhaps I am being a bit naive here.

Why not just tax fossil fuels like hell and remove all other taxes (except for harmful addictive things like booze and tobacco).

This would soon sort things out.

Hi , I am an aussie. I agree with all the P.O believers in this thread, and the article provides some useful info about unsustainability. While a nation obsesses about keeping lawns mowed, food repices begin to soar. There is no argument that food should be produced locally and as close to the consumer of that food as possible. Peak Gas and Russia's Putin holding militant control over much of the worlds gas (which ofcourse also includes fertiliser produced from gas) and the other powers all vying to control oil, uranium and other energy commodities. The question I ask the economits (non believers of oil depletion) is: Are wars part of the balance needed for a healthy economy? Should we take from the poor to feed the ignorant and aggressive? Peak Oil is here. The only thing that is going to keep energy prices down, from here on in, is demand destrcution. The west is effectively starving the poor and developing nations with ideas like - The American Way of life is non - negotiable!

I must make the quote from the movie "Twins" where Danny Devito states to the crook on the phone "EITHER WE NEGOTIATE _ OR WE WITHER AND DIE!!!"

Maybe I'm missing something, but is this calculation assuming that when these various food stuff were transported to the grocery store, that they only brought enough for one person?

The scales of efficiency come from transporting food in bulk. If a truck brings 10,000 bananas 2,500km with minimal extra fuel for the weight of the bananas themselves, then they each have really only traveled 4km each. It's like carpooling for food.

One can argue that they should be transported on freight rail rather than trucks for even greater efficiency, and that food should be grown closer to home, but let's not forget that scales of efficiency save fuel too.

An recent article in the Economist , Voting with your Food Trolley challenges many of the local food saves energy assumptions, A sample paragraph.

The DEFRA report, which analysed the supply of food in Britain, contained several counterintuitive findings. It turns out to be better for the environment to truck in tomatoes from Spain during the winter, for example, than to grow them in heated greenhouses in Britain. And it transpires that half the food-vehicle miles associated with British food are travelled by cars driving to and from the shops. Each trip is short, but there are millions of them every day. Another surprising finding was that a shift towards a local food system, and away from a supermarket-based food system, with its central distribution depots, lean supply chains and big, full trucks, might actually increase the number of food-vehicle miles being travelled locally, because things would move around in a larger number of smaller, less efficiently packed vehicles.

Translation: The biggest reduction in food chain energy costs would come about by customers of supermarkets using more efficient cars and consolidating their shopping trips,

As I choose to see it this debate is substantially about developing a distributed food production system or continue to rely on having a few large farms supplying our needs. I live in a state in the USA (Vermont) where lots of small growers have picturesque New England farms where everything is tidy and lovely. Words and phrases like “localvore”, “Farm to Family”, and “Eat Local” are commonly heard. I recall that this summer some politicians decided to attempt to “eat local” for a week of so. And the did. They also found that it was more costly than buying at the super market. So for now, the “magic of the marketplace” Ronald Regan so loved is in the drivers seat.
I do buy from the local growers; I sort of see supporting them as akin to making my quarterly donations to Vermont Public Radio. I want both of them to continue so I pay.
Sure, the local growers do charge more, but I know what I'm supporting. Lots of them are friends of mine and I know their families, aspirations, their debt load and I know that they don't exploit other workers or the planet. It's really costly to purchase a farm, buy all the equipment needed and live through the years when you don't sell anything. But when they finally do succeed in growing a beautiful organic crop and have it laid out at the Saturday Farmers Market where everything is harmonious and lovely it is worth it to me and I gladly pay.

I'm developing a homestead of my own where I'm developing garden spots, small grain fields, building needed structures and so on. But I can afford to. Most folks cannot. They not only don't have the money they don't even know where to start. I subscribe to a number of the “back to the land” flavored magazines but overall I think that can be very misleading. There's seldom any stories in these about crop failure, predators getting into the chicken flock, arguments with neighbors when your cows get into their corn field and so on; it's all just rosy as can possibly be. I can tell you that crops do fail, chickens do get carried off by hawks, and the cows always get out at night when the temperature is about 33 and its raining.
However, if someone does foresee a possibility of interruptions of the food supply they having a fall-back may be right for them. The problem is that you can't wait until the supply is interrupted and then whip out a crop of enough grain and vegetables to keep the motions of live going. You have to spend some time learning and developing well before that event. An event that may not come for some time if ever. Or you may decide that paying a premium from the local grower is a way of preparing for the future.

It's a relief to know that this group is so confident in their calculations that they can report the CO2 emissions in Table 5 to 4 decimal places. . . . . .

There seesm to be an assumption that everone actually deserves to be have absolute choice of produce from a globalised menu and that anything less will see us all starve.

Many will go hungry but not becasue they can't get there lamb from New Zealand or tomatoes from Sapin in the winter. It will simply be that fertilizer and fuel for the tractors will become too expensive as the supplys deplete further and further into the future, and this will have a reduing effect on the avaialble surpluses to be exported. At some point, well before these surpluses actually disappear, the economies of scale will actually collapse, as the infrastructure required to transport both the inputs and the finished food cannot be efficiently operted at small volumes.

Take the rice industry for example. The drought has now killed this industry in Australia because one vital input, water, has declined in the last decade. The infrastructure that was built to handle many millions of tonnes has sat idle for many years and is now at the point where it is being permannetly abandoned. Even if the waters arrive next year, the infrastructure for processing a bumper crop is gone and therfore the total amount of food avaialble in the world will be reduced.

With Peak Oil, a vital input that is needed at every stage of production and delivery will be reduced and this will eventually have the same effect as the drought. Whole agri-business systems will reach a point of collapse because the cheap energy that made the masssive scale possible will no longer be avaialable.

The market purists will assert that people will just pay more for food and that will somehow make the producers find better and efficient ways to deliver the product. There will be much innovation I am sure and a great deal of effort will go inot trying to restore the way things were. What these guys really don't understand is how money represents energy.

Money is way in which the market allocates energy to those who can most effectively and employ it. All the worlds money reresents energy at it's base leveland the ability to grow the economy is function of the abiltiy to grow the energy supply. But all types of energy are equal. Oil has given us the ability to unlock vast and powerful energy sources that would have been impossible without it.

Agriculture is exhibit A in this ability to capture vast energy sources. Food is a major way of capturing solar energy on a masssive scale that is available at the most basic human level. Without it we die so it is pretty important that we keep up this aspect of solar capture. Waht is in question is that without oil, how can we achieve anything like the economies of scale that we have seen since the green revolution?

Hi Phil,
Nice to see you working on TOD from the sunny south instead of rainswept Aberdeen. One comment on the food miles lies in the concept itself: it's not just miles over the surface but also vertical miles - this can really make a difference as the oil and greenhouse impact of airfreight is rather high.
I also wonder if CERES has done any 'food fertilizer', 'food pesticides' or 'food processing' analysis to go along with food miles. From available data such as the FAO report "Livestock's long shadow" the climate impact of meat and dairy products, for example, is dominated by the effects of fertilizer and overfeeding livestock with high proteine animal feed (generating extra methane). According to the FAO livestock pruduction is responsible for 35-40% of the world's human influenced methane emissions, 64% of the human influenced ammonia and 65% of human influenced nitrous oxides. The last two through the inherent inefficiencies of artificial fertilizer in feed production. In Peak Fossil fuels terms: it's natural gas, stupid!
Anyway, I think that by adding these aspects to a food miles calculation one could get some kind of energy/climate indicator to the food basket that can be very useful.