by Elyse Myrans
On my most recent trip to the grocery store I reached for my much loved gala apples and noticed the little white stickers on them read: ‘Product of New Zealand’. The apple I was holding had traveled over 14,000 km! I put it back with it’s other foreign friends, and scanned the other kinds of apples piled high on the left and right; not one was Canadian grown, let alone local.

Those 14,000 km are called food miles. Food miles are the distance a product travels from where it’s grown to your plate, and it turns out that the typical meal consumed in North America has racked up 2,400km of them. As it is we are constantly inundated with media about the excessive green house gas emissions generated from long distance travel, so the last thing we really need to do is choose an apple –or any food for that matter- that has traveled such a distance.

You’ve probably heard about the book “The Hundred Mile Diet”, in which the authors describe their year of only eating food grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their home in Vancouver, Canada. While you may believe this to be a tad bit extreme, it certainly got a lot of people thinking about where their food comes from. Although I am not prescribing a strict 100-mile diet (although I challenge you to do it for one meal), you can do your part by making more local choices when possible. Buying fruits and veggies that are in season where you live is one of the easiest ways to go local. Not only will they taste better because they are fresher and haven’t traveled thousands of kilometers, but they will likely be less expensive because the added cost of fuel to transport them long distances won’t be on your bill.

Late summer is one of the best seasons for local produce in Ontario, so it is undeniably the perfect time to grow a ‘food-mile conscience’.

Needless to say, in the end, I didn’t leave the grocery store with any apples that day. Instead, I chose to take home a bag of mighty tasty Canadian grown peaches. Since my eye opening gala-apple experience, my own ‘food mile conscience’ has been growing at an exponential rate. While I’ve been eating more beans, blueberries, and plums than ever before, I’m still looking forward to the local gala apples that should be in grocery stores any day.

To find out what is in season: http://www.harvestcanada.com/seasonal.php
To find out where to buy local near you: http://www.eatwellguide.org/search/results/stores
To find your nearest farmers market: http://www.torontolife.com/guide/food/markets-farmers-markets/farmers-markets/location/