It's Worse Than We Thought: Food Miles Account For a Sickening Amount of Emissions

In many places around the world, grocery store produce aisles are filled with a variety of colors, even in the depths of winter.

A new study shows that food miles account for 19 percent of all food emissions, three times more than previously thought.

With only 12.5 percent of the world's population, high income countries are responsible for 46 percent of the world's food mile emissions.

About 30 percent of human-produced greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to global food systems. According to the study's lead author, food transport is a large portion of emissions.

Half of the emissions from road vehicles are from food transport.

Modeling the entire food chain around the world is difficult, and most papers in the past have looked at specific countries, or specific products, but this isn't able to scale out to give a good overall picture of what.

The carbon footprint of the global trade of food, accounting for the entire food supply chain, has not been quantified.

The researchers used a framework called FoodLab to take in 74 countries, 37 economic sectors, and four transportation modes to create a model that incorporated the entire global supply-chain network.

It's not comforting that the results are not good. 19 percent of all food related emissions, including land use, come from food transport alone.

If everyone ate locally, what would happen? The team was able to work out that it would reduce food miles emissions and food production emissions.

It's not realistic to eat entirely locally, as some places aren't able to grow their own food, but it gives a good suggestion of where we can go from here.

"We tend to interpret information around us in simplistic terms, like'meat is bad and vegetables are good', but we wanted a much more comprehensive picture."

He said that the study showed that eating locally is ideal in affluent countries.

The researchers think that consumers have the best chance of changing the world. Individually choosing the local or seasonal option is one of the best ways to move forward in high income countries.

This is important for fruit and vegetables as they need to be refrigerated to be sent around the world.

A country-of-origin label is sometimes included in grocery stores. If you know the location of the crop, it's even better.

Many people are used to being able to buy fruit and vegetables at any time of the year.

The habit of consumers in wealthy countries to demand unseasonal foods year-round is one example.

Eating local seasonal alternatives will help provide a healthy planet for future generations.

If you're in the US and want to know what fruits and vegetables are available in different times of the year, you can check out this link. When not in season, it's a good idea to choose frozen or canned vegetables, as they're able to be stored when they're most abundant.

The research was published in a journal.