British bury food miles

It would appear British shoppers are a savvy lot. According to research findings released by AgResearch and given wide media coverage here, British shoppers are not ‘concerned’ about food miles.

Rather, they are more interested in the price of their fresh food than where it comes from.

While I have no research to back up my belief, I suspect New Zealand shoppers are of pretty much the same mind.

The life cycle of the food miles concept is interesting.

Born in the UK in the 1990s on the back of conceptual papers about carbon generation, by 2005 the theory had got legs and was causing us concerns that it could become a barrier to our European food exports.

Lincoln University dampened enthusiasm for it in 2006 with a study that compared the total energy used to produce food in Europe and New Zealand. In 2009 the Australian Bureau of Agriculture added its weight with the statement that it was a ‘misleading indicator of the carbon footprint of foods’.

Then, this year, AgResearch demonstrated that getting NZ lamb from a British supermarket to the consumer’s home added more to the carbon footprint than all the transportation involved getting the lamb from the NZ farm gate to the British supermarket.

And now we have the coup de grace delivered by the British shopper - they are not interested anyway. It makes you wonder whether they ever were!

As a footnote, the Acting British High Commissioner made the UK’s position on food miles pretty clear in an address he gave in Wellington in June when he said “… we are not interested in food miles. Our approach has been on establishing analysis of the carbon dioxide emissions associated with production, consumption and disposal. If the sums add up, there’s nothing wrong with consuming products from around the globe. This is the UK’s policy.”

It is a comment that appears to have escaped the attention of the media.