 This lesson explores reasons why much of our food travels an average of 1500 miles before it reaches our plates. Our traveling food system has an impact on both the health of the environment and our bodies. When we reduce to us, we can become healthier through building our local businesses, protecting the environment, and eating fresher and possibly healthier food. Where do many of us purchase our food? Recently, we have seen the explosion of chain superstores, which are larger versions of the conventional supermarket, with at least 40,000 square feet in total selling area and more than 25,000 items. Some stores have as much as 180,000 square feet of selling space. That's the size of more than three football fields. Most of the food sold in superstores are shipped from far away because of the distribution and warehouse system these store chains have in place around the country. Because buying things that don't go through their warehouses for shipping out to all of their stores is hard for chains, more often than not, having chain stores carry food from far away is actually easier and cheaper than to carry products from close by. Some of the foods that we buy are flown thousands of miles to be in our stores when they often grow in our own state. Whenever possible, we should try to eat foods that have been grown close to where we live to reduce pollution caused by food being flown in trucked long distances. Foods that can be grown in North Dakota are often flown from far away, such as apples, grapes, lettuce, and tomatoes. Did you know apples are a member of the Rose family? Apples are grown throughout the United States. More than 7,500 varieties are grown around the world and have names such as Cherry Pippin, Black Twig, Lady in the Snow, Mclicious, and Sweet Wine Snap, just to name a few. Most regions that grow apples will have their own special variety. In some parts of the United States, apples are harvested in the autumn. Yet, in some parts of the United States, apples are grown year-round, such as Washington State. If we want to eat apples in the winter, we must choose apples from Washington State or even as far away as New Zealand. Grapes are true berries. Most of the grapes grown in the world are for juice or wine. Grapes have a long history and were cultivated as far back as 6000 BC. Fresh table grapes or dried grapes are mostly of the Thompson variety. Grapes are grown all over the world and actually grow best in less fertile soil, especially for wine. Here in the north, if we want to eat grapes in the winter, they have to come from places such as Chile. Some of our food sometimes is better traveled than we are. Lettuce is surprisingly hardy and prefers colder weather. That's why in northern climates, we can plant lettuce in the early spring and have lovely green leaves by the end of May or early June. But in the winter, when our ground is frozen, we get lettuce shipped from Arizona, Florida, or even Mexico. Do we have other types of salads besides lettuce salads that we can eat in the winter? Tomatoes in the winter? They're hard, sometimes mealy on the inside, and sometimes lacking flavor. But tomatoes in the summer are sweet, juicy, and soft. Many people wait all year for the first taste of a homegrown tomato. Tomatoes are a useful fruit and can be stored easily in the dried, frozen, or canned forms. In fact, certain nutrients in tomatoes are better utilized by the body in canned versus fresh tomatoes. So canned tomatoes in the winter are a good alternative to fresh. We can store summertime tomatoes easily in salsa or spaghetti sauce. If we want more fresh tomatoes in winter, they usually come from Florida, Mexico, or California. The origins of single food items are easy to track. However, the typical grocery store product from frozen dinners and pizzas to prepared and ready-to-eat soups, cakes, pies, and cookies contain multiple ingredients. For example, the ingredients in strawberry yogurt are sourced from all over the country. This is an example of strawberry yogurt sold in Des Moines, Iowa. Ingredients from the product include sugar from the Red River Valley, milk from Northeastern Iowa, and strawberries from California and Florida. The total weighted miles, or source distance, equals 2,216 miles. The source distances of the yogurt container, lid, seal, and shipping box were not considered in this mile calculation. Miles are one way of understanding the energy needed to get food to our plate. Now let's understand how this energy is translated into what the human body uses. Calories are a measure of how much energy we get from a particular food. Humans use calories as body fuel. Cars, trucks, planes, and trains use gasoline as engine fuel. One interesting way to understand the amount of energy used to transport food is to convert the gasoline used to calories used, and then to compare it to the number of calories and the actual food being transported. Remember, when we talk about fruits and vegetables, we are not talking about a lot of calories. One apple has 55 calories, one strawberry has 2 calories. Transporting one pound of apples from Washington State to Des Moines, Iowa takes 439 calories. These are only the calories used to transport the food. Consider the calories or fuel used to grow, harvest, and process food. Our food system uses a lot of energy. In fact, the amount of energy we put into our food system including growing, harvesting, transporting, processing, selling, storing, and preparing food far exceeds the amount of energy we actually get out of the system to sustain our bodies. Food miles are just part of the equation to consider. Some say we also need to think about how the food is grown. For example, raising and shipping lambs from New Zealand that graze on grass full of healthy clover actually requires less total energy than lambs raised in the United States and fed grains, which require a lot of energy to grow, harvest, and ship. Here are some ways we can conserve energy in the food system. We can grow crops that require less energy input, have our own gardens, consume less processed foods, eat a variety of foods, eat regionally grown foods, eat foods in season, and have energy efficient appliances in our homes and restaurants. We can impact the energy used in food production by making smart decisions about the foods we choose locally. Does eating only local foods make sense while other foods are still better shipped longer distances because they take less energy to grow in those far away places? Large variations exist between food types and energy used, so we need to be smart consumers. In general, eating foods within our food shed can save energy by reducing the fuel needed to ship foods long distances. A food shed refers to foods that are grown in our community or region that we actually can eat. The idea is to reduce the transportation energy used without adding to the other parts of the food system such as production, processing, and packaging. Fruits and vegetables are lower in calories and fit into this category of potentially saving energy by reducing their transportation. In 2007, the word locovor was chosen by the Oxford University Press as the word of the year. A locovor is someone who intentionally chooses locally produced foods to the fullest extent possible. Another word, food shed, is used to describe the geographic area that feeds people in a given population. Think about all of the places food eaten in your town or city possibly could or actually comes from. These places supply food to your city or town and are part of the food shed. Even Chile is part of your food shed when you eat grapes from there. Much of our food comes from far away, but a food shed can change as we eat more foods grown and processed closer to where we live. Think about where your tap water comes from. Most likely it's pretty local. Maybe a more familiar term is watershed, the area of land that catches rain and snow and drains or seeps into a marsh, stream, river, lake, or groundwater. So a local food shed is food grown and processed nearby to where we live. Think about these questions. What are some of the benefits derived from eating foods from your shed? What are some of the difficulties related to finding foods from your shed? How do you overcome the difficulties related to finding foods in your shed? Here are some ideas for learning about your food shed. 1. Learn what foods are in season in your area. 2. Take a trip with your family or friends to a local farm to learn what it produces. 3. Surf the internet for nearby farms and community kitchens where people gather to can foods. 4. Find your farmer's market on your state's Agriculture Department website. 5. Find your farmer's. 6. Start a garden, even a tiny one. 7. Plant a winter garden. Carrots can be mulched and harvested in the dead of winter. Greens can last through the cold. 8. Buy in bulk and preserve. 9. Get your school or community center to plant a garden. 10. Join 4-H, become a junior master gardener. 11. Find restaurants that feature local foods in your community. Ask the cooks where they get the food from. Do they indicate local foods on the menu? 12. Talk to your school's food service director or food service staff to ask what foods are local and what foods they are willing to explore buying locally. What will you do to eat more local foods? Step 1 is to decide on one thing. Will you learn more about what foods are grown and available locally? Ask the school lunch program staff in your district what foods they purchase locally or go to the grocery store to see what locally grown and processed foods are sold. Maybe you'll connect with a local farmer to buy direct. Or, on a wider scale, you'll form a buying club with a group of other people who are interested in buying direct from a farmer. Many small things we do together will add up to wider community changes.