I started my research by taking a look at where my food for the day came from. Food normally travels to great distances and several locations before making it to the table. It may be grown as raw materials in one location, processed in another, possibly processed into a final product at yet another location, and packaged at a separate location. To give a better visual of the distances traveled by my meals I created this map showing where each product was either grown or processed.
These are the most common areas for each of these items to come from, not necessarily where my particular beef or carrots came from. Very little of my meals originated in Canada, and not one item came from B.C. The winners for furthest traveled were my chocolate from Ethiopia and my coffee from Brazil. This became a little bit scarier when looking at the amount of coffee drunk in Canada alone. According to the Coffee Association of Canada, 63% of Canadians drink coffee on a daily basis, and that those people drink an average of 2.6 cups per day. I am beginning to better understand Richard Manning’s point about eating locally grown products in his article “The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq”. He says, “If I’ve done my due diligence, I will have found out that the particular lamb I am eating was both local and grass-fed, two factors that of course greatly reduce the embedded energy in a meal.” I never realized how much energy was wasted in the transportation process alone.