Supermarkets

If you're like most Americans, you get your food from a local supermarket. At a glance, all the food looks fresh, and the closest you get to seeing where each piece of produce comes from is a tiny sticker that you may just peel off. But where does all of this food come from? Taking a closer look at how fresh fruits and vegetables are imported may give us some insights into how far food actually travels to get to your market.

Do local supermarkets source foods locally? Let's look at your average shopping cart in a local Seattle-area supermarket. These are the top four consumed vegetables and top four consumed fruits in the United States, from the largest producers of each crop. All of these products are available year-round in American stores. The distances reflect travel from farm to the Seattle area (ignoring mode of transport and possible detours for processing). In total, a basket containing each of these items has traveled a total of 12,158 miles. The vegetables have traveled 4506 miles, the fruit has traveled 7652 miles. Even fruit and vegetables that are "Grown in the USA" can travel over 2000 miles to reach Seattle markets from the East Coast.

(Top producer data from USDA Economics, Statistics, and Market Information System, figure original)

In contrast, visit a locally sourced farmers market. In each of the closest farms available to source each of these produce items (farms found using Puget Sound Fresh, King County Agriculture Commission), the closest locally produced vegetables have only traveled 58 miles, and the closest locally produced fruits have traveled 3256 miles. This totals 3314 miles for the basket. Even with fruits like bananas and oranges unable to be locally grown and produced, importing from the closest source allows the total mileage to be almost a quarter of the supermarket basket.

( figure original)

Even the ubiquitous Washington apple is replaced in supermarkets by apples from New Zealand when apples go out of season. The impact on greenhouse gas emissions for this substitution is over double when production, processing, and transportation costs are added (Morgan 2007).

Local food systems are being out competed by the growing cost efficiency of the global market, with large impacts on both carbon emissions and the ecological footprint of agriculture. In Washington state, the majority of agricultural products for sale in local markets are still imported, even though there are 39,000 farms in the state and, as a whole, agriculture makes up 12% of the state GDP (Washington State Department of Agriculture). Put into perspective, there is about one farm in Washington state for every 200 Washingtonians. In other words, this is one of the ideal places to start buying local, and keep buying local. With seven farmers markets in the city of Seattle and two year-round markets, it makes sense to pay attention to where our food comes from.


On this and the following pages, we take a closer look at choosing local foods!