Food Miles, How Far Did the Food In Between your Teeth Travel?

What did you have for lunch today?????

How far did the ingredients in your lunch travel?

Well, chances are what's now stuck in between your teeth traveled thousands of miles to get to your grocery store.  So in our class we did an activity to see how far food travels. There were several choices of food cards to pick, the catch was we had no idea where the food displayed on the card came from. So once we had picked the primitive food card we flipped it over to see where it was from and what company produces it. Some food was from local farms, but some were from places across the world. We had to determine how far the food traveled, and then added it all up. In the end, our healthy lunch had traveled 9,520.8 miles!!!! That's putting out 35,226.96 pounds of CO (Carbon Monoxide) into the earth.

Food Travelling to Your Store Add Miles to Your Meal!

Now how much is that you might ask??? Picture it in elephants. Yes I said elephants.  Elephants weigh about 10,000 pounds so our lunch put out approximately 3.5 elephants of CO!!!

Imagine How Much Carbon That Is!!

You see on each card lets take fruits and veggie cards for example, both cards looked identical on the front, one choice was an apple. So say there was you chose one of the apple cards. As I implied, there were two apples, so after we picked one apple card we turned it around, it was from New Zealand!!!!  The other identical apple card was locally grown in Redmond Washington!!! There's a big difference in miles from New Zealand to Seattle compared to Redmond to our local grocery store.  Buying locally might be more expensive but it's much better for our carbon footprint, it reduces the amount of CO we put into our atmosphere, and chances are if you have seen where your food is raised or grown you will know what's in between your teeth.
by Ava