Food miles, which measure the distance food has travelled before it reaches the consumer, say “almost nothing” about the sustainability of a product, a global food systems expert has said.
While sustainability is important, it is “not everything”, according to the centre lead and director of the Food Systems Institute at the University of Nottingham, Jack Bobo.
Although locally produced food brings additional values, such as for quality, culture, and the local economy, he said the opportunity to look for shorter food chains should not be “oversold”.
Bobo does not believe that high net-worth individuals would shift to a bland food basket and adopt a seasonal diet, adding that a diverse food basket is generally “more nutritious”.
The sustainability and the carbon footprint of products produced should be kept in mind, however, he said that efforts to go “too far” will not be accepted by consumers.
Sustainability and food safety
Bobo was speaking at the “When Food Safety Met Sustainability” event hosted by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) in Dublin today (Thursday, November 16).
The need to ensure that the food system can meet consumer demands for sustainability, while continuing to protect consumers’ health in relation to food safety was discussed at the event.
“Often if we ask consumers [what sustainability means] they would say, ‘well if you produce food using less water, less pesticides, less insecticides, that would be more sustainable’.
“It would be, perhaps, more sustainable on that piece of land because you have a lower impact. But there is a reason farmers use inputs, because they get more output.
“So somebody else has to make up the difference. This is what I call local sustainability, the benefits are local but the impacts are global,” Bobo told the event today.
With intensive agriculture, he said, the impacts such as nitrification, run off, and soil erosion are local, but less land is required elsewhere, thus the benefits are global, he added.
“In terms of sustainability we need to realise that there are trade offs between local and global sustainability,” he said. Trade offs are also being made when it comes to food safety.
“There is no such thing as perfectly safe food, zero is a very small number. What we are really talking about is how much risk are we willing to accept.
“The safer something gets, the more it costs and fewer people can afford it,” according to the global food systems expert.
“There are a lot of health benefits to having fresh food, but if you don’t consume it right away it can spoil and if it spoils you have a certain type of risk.
“By processing that food, you can extend the shelf life, you make it more sustainable but now maybe you have food additives and maybe those have a certain type of risk,” he said.
Transparency today is what food safety was 100 years ago, when consumers cared about food safety because “our food would kill us”, Bobo told the event today.
However, as food became safer, food safety moved from something that companies aspired to, to something that is expected. Brands were not a quality mark, but a promises not to kill the consumer, Bobo said.
Consumers today reward the market for being transparent in terms of ingredients and supply chains. However, in 10 or 15 years they will punish the market for failures of transparency, he said.