The 30-mile diet: eating local, eating green with Cambridge Carbon Footprint

Bev Sedley from Cambridge Carbon Footprint diet explains why her New Year’s resolution is to eat local, seasonal and well (until at least February!):

This is a resolution with a difference – it will benefit our own health, but also benefit the local economy, reduce our carbon footprint and raise awareness about the contribution food makes to climate change. If this all sounds a bit serious, let me say that it is also extremely delicious, a good way of making new friends

The rules are simple:

• “local” means fruit and veg grown, or meat and eggs produced, within a 30-mile radius of Cambridge

• “local” for other things means within East Anglia

You will be glad to hear that there is an additional rule: an “opt-out”, which says that we can have up to five non-local items of our own choosing (eg. bananas, chocolate, coffee)

So why eat local?

• To reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Food makes up a surprisingly large part of our individual carbon footprints and food footprint can vary enormously, depending on what we eat and where it comes from.

• To celebrate the amazing diversity of our local seasonal produce

We produce some wonderful foods in Cambridgeshire but often don’t know where our food comes from. Eating locally gives us a chance to get to know and support our local farmers (shopping at the Cambridge Sunday farmers’ market is a great social experience, worlds away from the drudgery of pushing a trolley round a supermarket!).

• To ensure food security

We are incredibly dependent on long and complex food supply chains – did you know that during the oil blockades a few years ago, we were three days away from having no food on supermarket shelves?

• To have a healthier diet

Eating local food usually means cooking from scratch, which means we know exactly what we are eating – nowadays we often eat large amounts of sugar, salt and fats in processed foods without even realising just how high the level really is in our diet. This can contribute to some serious health problems.

But how does eating locally help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

Transport = 20 per cent of food based greenhouse gas emissions

Local food from a farmers’ market or a veg box scheme has travelled a much shorter distance than supermarket food from all over the world. Even when supermarkets display “local” food, it has often travelled further than you might think: even if it is produced just down the road, as it has to be packaged centrally. And buying soft fruits from California has an enormous carbon cost, as the fruit has to be flown in.

Packaging = 10 per cent

Local food often has a lot less packaging and if it’s from a market it can often go straight in your bag.

Processing = 20 per cent

As a general rule, the more ingredients in our diet, the higher the emissions from processing the food. This means it is better to cook your meals from scratch – something we would have done without thinking 50 years ago. This is where eating local food really wins out – most processed and ready-meals have ingredients that come from all over the world. If we want to be sure of eating local food, we need to cook more from scratch, which is creative, fun and delicious!

Production = 50 per cent

This is where eating locally doesn’t necessarily make a difference. Eating meat and dairy products accounts for an enormous part of our food footprint, partly because of the methane that cows give off and partly because you could feed eight people on the food a cow eats to produce one small steak. So, while eating locally, we need to be a bit careful about how much meat and cheese we eat, even if it is local – some of our local cows are grass-reared (lower emissions!) and eat spare crops like parsnips and silage in the winter, but they still belch and fart, so should be enjoyed sparingly! Wild rabbits and pigeons, on the other hand, are zero-carbon, as they are a pest to the farmer!

The reason organic food is better for the environment is that artificial non-organic pesticides and fertilisers are made from fossil fuels and so are high in carbon emissions.

Local food can be quite high in carbon emissions if it is eaten out of season – you know the sort of thing: local tomatoes grown in a hothouse in the winter, local apples kept in cold store and eaten in May, when they are more carbon-intensive than apples imported from New Zealand. In order to really benefit from eating locally, we need to enjoy our food seasonally as well – the way we all did until 40 years ago, when refrigeration really took off and we started sourcing food globally. Personally, I find food tastes much more special when you can’t have it all the time: nothing beats our local asparagus in May, strawberries in June, July, August, apples in September, over-wintered broad beans in April…

But what about it being winter?

Actually there are an enormous number of vegetables available in winter. All the root veg: carrots, potatoes, parsnips, swede, beetroot, artichokes; the cabbage family: cauliflower, sprouts, broccoli, white cabbage, red cabbage…. as well as stored squash and pumpkins, leeks, chard… OK, there isn’t a lot of fresh fruit, apart from stored apples, but there are dried and bottled fruits.

We deliberately chose to start our six-week period of eating locally and seasonally in January because we wanted to see how enjoyable it could be in the depths of winter! And, to ease things along a bit, we have arranged for Tine Roche, of the Cambridge Cookery School, to give us a demonstration of gourmet cooking using only seasonal, local food on February 8. There will also be a prize for the best local, seasonal winter recipe.

Contact Mary Geddes at Cambridge Carbon Footprint on 01223 368845 or at [email protected] for more information.

Diet and Weight loss with Bill & Sheila
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