I love almost everything about shopping at the farmers market, from the satisfaction of knowing the people who raise my food to the encounters with other shoppers to the political and economic choices it lets me make. But because I don’t get out to rural New York much, I don’t have a very real sense as to where this food is actually from. I’ve been buying “food with a face” for years, but have had no sense of place to go with it.
So, on a recent trip to market, I kept track of what I bought from which growers, then went home and made a Google map to see where those farms are. Click on the names to see how far each farm is from Union Square (and what I bought last weekend, in case that’s interesting). The map, you might say, is a graphic view of the New York City Greenmarket foodshed.
I’ll admit to an ulterior motive for this dorky little project: I wanted to see how far my food travels to get to me. Tara and I haven’t made specific efforts to buy regionally, and we certainly bring home Italian olive oil, French vinegar, and the occasional lemon from Florida or California. But since the biggest bulk of our food—our produce, meat, fish, and much of our dairy—comes from the farms on that map and their neighbors, I got to wondering how many “food miles” went into our meals.
One of the many motivations behind the recent interest in eating locally is environmental. The often-repeated claim is that food in the US is shipped an average of 1,500 miles before it’s sold; so, the logic goes, if you eat food grown locally and shipped a shorter distance, you burn less gas to feed yourself. I can’t help noticing that the most vocal locavores are based in California, where local citrus and avocados might make the task less of a burden, but the basic idea is pretty appealing.
So I kept track of everything we ate for dinner last week, and where each ingredient came from. To figure out the total distance traveled for each meal, I multiplied the distance each ingredient traveled by the amount it weighed and divided by the weight of all the ingredients used for that meal. I had to guess at a few things. I decided that flour comes from, um, Bismark, North Dakota (1,645 miles from New York), Italian olive oil comes from Florence (4,162 miles), and so on.
It was a fascinating exercise. Most of our meals traveled about 500 miles, because almost all of them used a little bit of something from far away. I made an aioli one night, for instance, and though the vegetables and eggs came an average of 110 miles, the 6 ounces of olive oil came from Europe and really bumped up the total. The meal from farthest away used a cup and a half of polenta from Italy (which was delicious, I must say, topped with sautéed peppers and sausages from Flying Pigs); the most neighborly meal was a big ragout of late-summer vegetables with fresh cannellini beans.
At the end of the week, I realized that the best way for me to eat more locally would be to find a source for good every-day American olive oil. (No, I am not going to start cooking everything in clarified local butter.) My interest is piqued, though, and I’ll probably try this experiment again in February next year, when there’s nothing at the Greenmarket but withered roots and frozen meat.
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