1500 miles...

oh geez, i just love being in school and getting to ponder all the things i have always wanted to. we had a guest lecturer last week who freely touted the line that we have all heard so many times (or maybe you haven't...so start paying attention now!) that our food travels on average 1500 miles to get from farm to table. our lovely professor asked us to think about that number we hear so often...and ask where it comes from. as i am a person who tends to like facts, i decided to do some hunting. and while we can all gather from the state of our current food system that food sure does travel far...where does that number come from? looks like that specific number comes from an early 2000's Leopold Center study/report looking at food miles to Chicago. I don't have to tell you about it because Slate already has done a good job of it. fascinating! i love how the media can get a hold of anything...and the public picks it up and suddenly it becomes widely accepted fact...kind of like the fad diets we get to talk about in nutrition class. the original paper looks really interesting (and specific) mostly because it outlines exactly how they determine food miles for food. i think that the paper focuses solely on produce, which makes sense since it has a single point of origin and little processing (mostly dispersion through distrubution hubs). what i want to know is how we can think about things like food miles for products like coke or peeps. (from corn field to lab to processing plant and on and on). la la la! i am so happy.

on a side note, peeps are a frequently used reference 'junk food' in nutrition class. hmm.