Food Miles Quotes

Buying from a local farmer can mean that he makes a two-hour extra truck drive, which can damage the environment more than a bunch of bananas on a boat.

I think that once I started connecting dots of where my food was coming from and the reality of that, as opposed to maybe what you think it is as a little kid, and the realities of how my food was getting to my plate and what the real effects of that are. When I started connecting those dots, I couldn't disconnect them.

We have the industrial agriculturalists who try and make an argument that big is beautiful. But if you do the math, and particularly if you factor in that the price of oil is going to go through the roof, and so the price of transportation is going to go through the roof - making it abundantly clear that it's out of whack. The efficiency arguments are already crumbling, particularly if you actually include the cost of food pollution that these industries cause. They are tremendously unsustainable and tremendously inefficient.

My grandmother taught me the seasonality of food. She lived with the rhythms of nature. That's the way we should live. Why do we need raspberries in January flown from Chile?

In many places in the developed world, we eat or waste probably twice as many food calories as we really need. We're wasteful of food. We ship all over the world. We're now realizing that generating the energy to ship the food around the world is also ruining our climate.

Whenever possible, I use local, fresh ingredients, just because it tastes and feels better to eat an egg or a tomato or a hamburger that wasn't flown halfway around the world, that didn't travel on a truck and get stuck in traffic jams, that hasn't been sitting in a supermarket's refrigerator case for days.

If people are prepared to eat locally and seasonally, then they probably do pretty well in terms of environmental impact.

The industrial food system ships in high-calorie, low-nutrient, processed food from thousands of miles away. It leaves us disconnected from our food and the people who grow it.

You need to eat what's local. So that's what I'm trying to do - just be as close to nature as possible.

We need to ban all air-freighted food. Carrots from Holland. Potatoes from Egypt. It's got to stop.

I think the local food movement has been taken to idiotic extremes. And so I wrote about that and people got pissed.

With the growth of both urbanization and globalization, consumers are becoming increasingly disconnected from their food.

To have 95% of the ingredients sourced, food and wine, within 100 miles radius, that's a dream come true for any chef.

In an attempt to have access to everything year-round, produce has lost its magic.

When the farmer can sell directly to the consumer, it is a more active process. There's more contact. The consumer can know, who am I buying this from? What's their name? Do they have a face? Is the food they are selling coming out of Mexico with pesticides?

Supermarkets don't really sustain a community, and they completely remove people from the food chain.

We are reaching a stage where the source of food has become markets and supermarkets. On a sub-conscious level, we are becoming unaware of the original source, which is land.

I would like to see people more aware of where their food comes from. I would like to see small farmers empowered. I feed my daughter almost exclusively organic food.

Today, the origin of 90% of all the edible food Gambians consume are from places they have never heard of.

Farm to table is a personal choice.

That many if not most people...who want fresh leafy greens in January buy them at the supermarket after they've been bleached and plastic-bag shipped from California or beyond is not a tribute to modern technology; it's an unprecedented abdication of personal responsibility and a ubiquitous benchmark of abnormality.

Buy local fruits and veggies at the grocery store. You will support local businesses and cut down on all the fuel that is used to truck produce around from state to state.

The shorter the chain between raw food and fork, the fresher it is and the more transparent the system is.

I think as individuals, people overrate the virtues of local food. Most of the energy consumption in our food system is not caused by transportation. Sometimes local food is more energy efficient. But often it's not. The strongest case for locavorism is to eat less that's flown on planes, and not to worry about boats.

My goal is to go from the industrial food system toward a real food system where you understand what you are eating.