The 3 main areas of a person’s energy use are buildings, food and transport. So although food is not the main focus of this website it’s worth a mention as an important area with potential to save. And the current food system is seriously screwed up.
The UK only supplies 60% of it’s own food. It exports about £18m, while importing £36m; but some of that is the same food. UK potatoes are sent to the continent for washing, and back to UK supermarket shelves.
Buy Local …
Try and buy local. But if you shop in a supermarket bear in mind that those local vegetables on the supermarket shelf in Hull may have been grown on an East Yorkshire farm, but travelled to the national distribution centre in the South East… and back.
… But What is far more important than Where
“GHG emissions from transportation make up a very small amount of the emissions from food and what you eat is far more important than where your food traveled from.
CO2 emissions from most plant-based products are as much as 10-50 times lower than most animal based products.” – Our World in Data
Meat & dairy has a massive environmental impact. Rainforest is being cleared to grow soya to feed cattle. The amount of land required to produce meat is many times more than for growing food – there simply isn’t enough land on the planet for us all to eat as much meat as we do in the UK. Even if the last meat you ate was from UK animals, do you know where their feed came from?
Veg Patch
Last year was the house. Next year is the garden, and you can’t get any more local than your own garden or allotment.
The carbon emissions associated to our purchased food can be very high, so as well as the health benefits and pleasure to be gained from growing your own, it offers an often overlooked carbon saving.
Organic Food
We get organic fruit and veg, local when possible, from Arthurs Organics.
