Food

A good rule of thumb when it comes to food is try to choose products that are in season, locally grown and buy from local suppliers.

Try a seasonal approach i.e. choose fruits and vegetables that are natural in season rather than those which either need to travel thousand of miles or are grown in artificial micro-climates here in the U.K, as both these alternatives will mean increased embedded energy costs and resultant Greenhouse gas emissions. Embedded energy cost are not always that easy to establish - particularly when buying from Supermarkets, as often fruit or veg grown in the UK can still have journey many miles through numerous distribution centres before it gets to your shelf. To be sure that local produced produce has only travelled locally try your greengrocer or box scheme provider - they should be able to tell you where the products you choose have been grown and how they got to his store.

If you can afford it - go organic. Not only will you consume fewer chemicals and additives, but you will also be supporting agriculture which has less detremental impact on the environment.

Try to buy products that use as little packaging as possible and where packaging is unavoidable, look for the recycling logo. In most cases a local greengrocer will be very happy to pack fruit and veg straight into your shopping bag and a number of supermarkets are now offering loose fill Fruit and Veg. Pick-your-own is of course another great alternative.

Meat and livestocks: Increasingly Supermarkets are giving details of their growers and producers, but even if the animal appears to have been reared locally, as with fruit & veg, the products on the shelves may well have considerably higher embedded energy costs. This is because there is a good chance that the animal will have been shipped to another part of the country for slaughter and then through several distribution centres before getting to the shelf. All this means lots of embedded energy cost in haulage miles. Meat & game from your local butcher is likely to have considerably lower embedded energy costs - a good butcher should be able to tell you where the animal was reared and slaughtered.

If you do want to go further then you might want to consider a vegetarian or even vegan diet. Here are a few 'facts' courtesey of The Vegan society which explain why these diets are considered more environmentally friendly.

Farm animals are relatively inefficient and only convert between 5 and 15% of their food energy into meat, eggs or milk. As a result the fossil energy input required to produce a day's food for each diet type is as follows:

25% of the worlds land surface is used for grazing cattle - about 1.25 billion of them as a rough estimate. meat eaters are indirectly responsible for 8 times as much land useage as Vegans, with vegetarians somewhere in the middle. If released this land could be used for fuit and vegeatbloe cultivation as well as reforestation and Bio-fuel crops etc.

When it comes to water consumption, as with their energy useage, farm animals are large consumers - here's the equivalent daily table:

It's a rather indelicate subject, but farm animals also responsible for significant Greenhouse gas emissions as a result of their methane production and their urine and excrement (nearly 25Kg every day in the case of cows) contain nitrates and ammonia which leach into surface and groundwater and can have a negative environmental impact.