Why Does Food Travel?

Consumer Desire : Getting What We Want

If you take a look at your local supermarket or corner store you will see food of all types that has travelled many miles - known as food miles - to the store.

This includes fruit and vegetables - bananas and pineapples are good examples of this, as they are fruits that cannot be grown in the United Kingdom, due to a wetter and cold climate, so they are imported from abroad where they are grown and cultivated on a massive scale in order to export to countries such as this.

Even though the UK is an agricultural farming-based economy, and our farmers grow wonderful fruits and vegetables, and produce great quality food like Welsh lamb and Scottish beef to name just a few examples, the ever-expanding consumer marketplace has demanded fruits and vegetables and different types of produce all year round, so food suppliers search further and further around the globe to source food to supply this demand.

The demand is there, and consumers are wealthier than ever before, and as International travel has expanded and more of us travel far and wide, both on holiday and for business, the knowledge of certain types of food available overseas creates the pressure and demand in the marketplace and food suppliers know that by responding to that demand they will win the consumers favour, loyalty, and grow wealthy from doing so.

Food Politics : Supermarkets, Governments And Local Production

Unfortunately, politics and the business of politics has entered the marketplace of food production, supply and sourcing, as it has every other type of commerce.

The major supermarket chains are all in competition with each other, and one of their main areas where the battle really hots up is in sourcing and distributing food.

If one of the main supermarkets can source a consistent supply of good quality lamb for instance, in Australia, then it will quickly set up a deal with the local production middleman on the ground in that country, get contracts and supply in place, and then ship it to its supermarkets here in the UK extremely quickly.

This will be followed up by an aggressive marketing campaign, both in-store and in the National media, and consumers will enjoy a glut of good quality, good-priced meat - and either not know or not care that it has come so far and comes to the plate with food miles attached.

Governments do deals with both the supermarkets and with the suppliers, in their own and overseas Countries, to keep trade flowing, and to keep trade quotas.

Governments do deals with each other to promise to purchase food and goods from each other - as trade quotas - and supermarkets and exporter/importers can find that their foodstuffs are actually subsidized by the Government quota.

Thus financial and trade incentives are in place to support bringing certain food items, including meat, to the UK, which has plenty of its own produced meat, all the way from such far-off places as Australia, or Indonesia, or South America.

Supporting Local Producers And Advocating Consumer Power

The loser in this system is always the local supplier, who finds they cannot compete with cheaper produce sold at the local supermarket. Many small to medium scale farmers across the UK have gone out of business over the past 10 years due to this increased importation policy put in place by the supermarket chains.

Farmers are forced to competitively price their produce, which on one level is a good thing, but they realise that however much they bring their price down, per pig or per lamb, or per ton of potatoes, the supermarkets will always be able to undercut that by going further and further afield to source even cheaper supplies.

Ultimately, as well as the farmer losing out, so does the consumer. Even though the price is cheaper for our goods, we have less choice, and in the new environmental reality of the marketplace, our food increasingly comes with 'dirty' food miles attached, with all the negative connotations of carbon output this entails.

As consumers, we do have the power to control the marketplace for the food we eat. We can take an interest in where the food has come from - we have the power to visit local farms and see how our food is grown or reared if we wish to.

Consumers in the UK can support local farmers, growers and food producers, and ensure that the food we eat doesn't have to travel miles from the field to our plate.