Food delivery and its environmental impact?

[Ohad]

Recently I try to think about suggestions for how to make the food room in my military base more green. The first thing I’m gonna do is to suggest plant based vegan changes, but then something disturbing caught my attention.
I live in Israel, which is a small country. There is no way we produce all our food here. It must come from other countries and beyond the sea(which I suppose means extremely environmental impact).
Should I suggest specific foods that I know they are grown in Israel or near it? And how can I know where any food comes from?

 

[500channelsurfer]

I am very concerned over this and for years have made some effort to reduce my food's carbon footprint. We are going to get into local vs. organic debate I think.

In most countries, grocery stores are required to display somewhere the country or region of origin of the produce on their shelves, and packaged food needs to at least display the manufacturer, so you can usually look up that food's origin too. If you are purchasing from a bulk supplier or non-grocery store food purchases, your supplier should have the information readily available.

Irony: I used to have a market stand near me that would sell organic Israel-grown produce. I am in Canada.

Environmental footprint is not only how far away food comes from, but also how it is grown and processed. Here vegan and raw foods mostly have smaller carbon footprints.

I tend to lean more toward organic food purchasing than local, because too many growers everywhere use carbon-intensive pesticides, insecticides and fertilizer, and organic food availability keeps increasing including from more local farms.

Also how food is processed can be carbon-intensive. Produce and foods that are closer to their natural forms are less carbon-intensive than anything fermented or put through any industrial or mass re-packaging process. Don't forget that food that is grown near you is not necessarily less carbon-intensive: You will want to read about foods' entire farm-to-store journey to make sure it was not, for example, shipped far away to be processed and packaged in a carbon-intensive manner, before getting shipped back to your local grocery store.

 

[Jamie in Chile]

According to the calculations and data I've seen, the no 1 way to cut the environmental impact of food is to reduce animal products. Reducing waste is another good thing.

The food being local also has an impact, but is less important. And is often overrated. You want to avoid air freighted food, but the emissions of travelling by boat are not huge. One way to get more local food is to buy food that is in season.