Food mileage

Have you ever considered how far your food travels? It might sound like an abstract question, but what we eat has a lot of impact on the environment, especially if it is transported over long distances. This is the starting point of the "food mileage" discussion.

Food mileage can be defined as the aggregate product of a food item's weight and its transportation distance. It is expressed in units of t-km (1000-kilometer). To present it in a simpler way, the Osaka-based Aozora Foundation calculated the resulting CO2 emissions by multiplying a coefficient according to the means of transportation. The term was coined by Tim Lang in Britain as "food miles" and promoted by civic groups such as Friends of the Earth. The term "food mileage" was created in Japan when the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry's Policy Research Institute began researching the issue around 2000.

According to the institute's survey based on the 2001 data of six countries--Japan, Britain, France, Germany, South Korea and the United States--Japan tops the food mileage list with 900 billion t-km, indicating the greatest environmental damage. South Korea and the United States follow at around 300 billion t-km, while the figure is between 100 billion and 200 billion t-km for the three European countries:

900 Japan
300 US, South Korea
100-200 Britain, France, Germany

"I thought Japan's food mileage would be high because of its lack of food self-sufficiency, but it was shocking that the figure was so much larger than the other five countries," said Tetsuya Nakata, who carried out the research at the institute.

The initial purpose of the research was to provide materials to draw up government policies on food supply, said Nakata, who now heads the consumer life department at the Kyushu Regional Agricultural Administration Office. "I never expected the concept would give people an opportunity to think about what they eat. It's a pleasant surprise," he added.

If you live in the Osaka area, you might have seen the local Osaka NHK program about Aozora's Food Mileage game, which aired in September 2007.

Photos from the Aozora Foundation Blog (Japanese)

Yomiuri Shimbun: Gauging your food mileage