Andrew Craig-Bennett hits out at foodstuffs moving by plane.
Long ago, in an expensive hotel, I saw a menu that offered air flown beef. I did wonder how anything might fly, if not by air, on this planet anyway, but it was a menu, and the more expensive the restaurant, the sillier the menu, as a rule. This was very silly; beef should be hung, chilled, and sent by sea. Nothing is gained by sending a food which requires time to come to its ideal state by air. The same goes for bananas, and lots of other stuff.
All of this passes clean over the heads of a current generation of pundits and influencers on social media.
May I invite you to consider the food mile?
As far as I can see, none of the gurus who talk about food miles in front of a camera, or who write about “food miles” anywhere, draw a distinction between air miles, truck miles, railway miles, river and canal miles and sea miles.
If you are reading this, you can probably think of a ship that you know, and you can recite her speeds, her consumptions, her deadweight and a few other commercially handy things about her.
Armed with this information you can take a fair stab at the carbon footprint of a food mile for something edible carried onboard that ship. To be fair, we probably ought to add in the carbon footprint of the ballast leg, or the backhaul, where there is one of those.
Now let us do the same for an aircraft, for a train, and for a truck. In fairness to the aircraft, we can draw a distinction between under belly hold space on a scheduled passenger aircraft and hold space on a dedicated cargo aircraft, in the latter case thinking about the backhaul as well.
Ship food miles will have the smallest carbon footprint.
What are the food miles in a loaf of bread?
Food miles are a silly idea, aren’t they? But this is not the first silly idea to persuade people into foolishness.
We can laugh at the foolishness of food miles, but we really ought not to ignore them. The idea of food miles, without attention paid to the carbon footprint of the different types of food miles, represents an actual danger to our way of life – the carriage of goods by sea.
Food is typically heavy; we know this when we think of the average weight of a reefer box. This is because most foods that have not been dried to preserve them contain a good deal of water. Grains and pulses carried by sea have been dried, of course, and they are not exactly light, either. It follows that food ought to go by sea.
There really are people who imagine that most of the food on the shelves of a supermarket has been air flown. These people – and there is not a lot that we can do about it, apart from trying to educate them – very often have votes, or other ways of influencing their politicians.
We ought not to let the pundits and influencers get away with this: food plants and animals are commonly cheaper, both in cost and in damage to our planet, to grow in the climate that they are best adapted to, and then shipped – by ship.
