Instead of buying food from far away places, it makes much more sense to buy food, which is grown locally, sold by local farmers and consumed by locals.
There are studies which calculate how many kilometers are traveled to produce and deliver foods to You, the consumer. Here some staggering numbers:
- yogurt – over 10,000km (plastic, aluminium top, milk from one place, processing in another place, fruit/ flavor grown in another country, branded by another company, distributed by diesel trucks)
- meat – 1kg needs about 800 litres of water, animal grows up in one area, gets slaughtered at a factory, gets processed in another factory, gets packaged, transported to a warehouse, gets distributed to your local supermarket
- fruit – strawberries can be bought all year around, even though they and other fruit only grow for a few months here in Aotearoa. This means the fruit gets picked overseas, stored, chilled or frozen, shipped to NZ, stored in warehouse and then distributed to your supermarket
- vegetable – your fancy, out of season vegetables are grown either somewhere else in NZ or even overseas, get picked there, transported to a warehouse, stored/ chilled/ frozen there, then packaged and transported to another warehouse, redistributed from there to your local supermarket
- juices – your favorite drink typically is produced from overseas fruit ingredients, grown outside of NZ, stored and processed overseas, transport to NZ
Here is an interesting study/ infographic where people get their food at present and where they may like to get their food from in the future
Northland Innovation Centre 