The great food swap

Most people these days are aware of the huge distances much of our food travels before it reaches the supermarket shelves. One shopping basket of organic products could have travelled 241,000 kilometres and released as much CO2 into the atmosphere as an average four-bedroom house does through cooking meals over eight months. Some products such as bananas and coffee cannot be produced domestically, but the ongoing 'food swap' of the same or similar products puts us all at risk. The absurdity of this practice is demonstrated by the fact that Britain imported 240,000 tonnes of pork in the same year that we exported 195,000 of pork. We imported 125,000 tonnes of lamb while exporting 102,000 tonnes and, even more bizarrely, we imported 61,400 tonnes of poultry meat from Holland while exporting 33,100 tonnes to Holland in the same year!