The Long Way Round

Buying fresh produce that hasn't travelled as far as Michael Palin before it reaches your table became a little harder this weekend as close to a century of milk production and distribution in Totnes curdled.
More than 160 employees at the town's Dairy Crest wandered into the manager's office on Saturday morning to pick up their redundancy cheques, then spent Saturday evening pouring some of it across the bar at their leaving do at the Grand Hotel in Torquay.
For those 160-odd, their friends and families and all those whose own livelihoods depended on the Totnes site, the impact of the closure is obvious, and potentially huge.
For the average shopper at Morisson's in Totnes picking up four pints of Westcountry semi-skimmed you could be forgiven for thinking that nothing has changed. But it has.
Because while last Friday those four pints of Devon white gold collected in our fair county travelled just a couple of hundred metres from the front door of Dairy Crest, where they were processed, to the back door of Morrisons, where they were sold, those exact same pints now travel well over 350 miles to get to the same destination.
And the same goes for whichever Morrisons or Sainsbury's you buy your local milk from (because it will still be sold as local), or even if you have Dairy Crest drop your milk at your front door.
While the milk will still be collected locally, in Devon, Cornwall and Dorset, before it reached your doorstep or your shopping trolley, and will end up at local depots like the one in Plympton, and supermarkets like Sainsburys at Marsh Mills and Morrisons in Outland Road, it now has to go on a sightseeing tour to a processing plant in Gloucestershire or London on the way.
So even if you live next door to Farmer Giles, the dairy farmer, and its his milk you buy - you could well find it now travels hundreds of miles to get to you.
This is the challenge consumers now regularly face when trying to buy local. You can shop at farmers markets and organic shops where each product is labelled with its point of origin, and you know it took the most direct route to get there - minus several middle men.
But achieving that inner warmth only middle-class satisfaction can generate can be expensive, inconvenient and it can limit your shopping choice.
So off you pop to your local hyper-mega-uni-corp supermarket where, handily, they have recently taken to selling hundreds of lines of local produce.
Fresh fruit and veg, milk, cheese, meats and more all now come from that bloke down the road.
But that still doesn't mean they have just been driven down the road - the chances are they have taken the long way round.
Until recently Tesco shipped all of it produce, local or not, to a giant central depot before then shipping it back to the places where it is actually local to.
Recently it started experimenting with local depots, including one in Plymouth, so Westcountry produce will stay in the Westcountry.
Not perfect, but a step forward. In order to be perfect the produce would have to take the shortest possible route from producer to retailer to consumer. Farmer drops it at the back door of Tesco, you buy it at the front. Of course the logistics of an operation like that, and the cost it would add to the produce mean it won't happen. Tesco will never be a farmer's market, and wouldn't claim otherwise.
But, while I've quoted the example of Tesco's, there is really no need to single them out. You can be sure that the local produce you buy at just about any other supermarket will have taken a little vacation on route to your plate.
Some supermarkets, Sainsburys for example, have a great system whereby you can check right down to the farm or producer where your goods came from. But that doesn't mean you get the full theaa.com routemap of the journey it took.
In the US produce travels an average 2000 miles between producer and consumer. In the UK, Defra reckon that between 1992 and 2002 our food miles here in the UK rose by 15 per cent.
The lesson here? Well, firstly that if you buy your milk at a supermarket or get it delivered to your door you could well find this morning that your carbon footprint got a little bigger over the weekend thanks to the couple of hundred extra food miles on every pint of milk. And secondly that, when it comes to supermarkets, local doesn't mean that an item has always been local right through the chain it takes to get to your plate.
Want to know more? Here are some useful links.
The BBC has a good page, defining food miles and why they matter, with articles and a discussion at http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/food_matters/foodmiles.shtml
For a more in depth analysis, check out the Wikipedia article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_miles
You can get a rough idea of the food miles taken to get to you if you know the country of origin of your produce with a basic food miles calculator at
http://www.organiclinker.com/food-miles.cfm
...and you can then calculate how much CO2 is pumped into the air by that journey at Farmers Weekly, where you will also find a host of other useful links at
http://www.fwi.co.uk/gr/foodmiles/more.html