Food Miles

This week we began a small project where we looked at sustainable food sources and a specific type of cookie. We looked at all the ingredients of the cookie in order to see how far each ingredient has come to be on our table.  

During class this week we watched a comical film about organic foods are being taken over by inorganic foods. The organic foods were fighting back to try and keep their presence felt in the grocery store. In our society organic foods are being overpowered and people are buying more inorganic foods from other locations around the world instead of locally grown fruits and vegetables like we have grown on our farm. This movie gave us a good basis for our next unit of food that we will be studying.

We then got introduced to our cookie or "Food Miles" worksheet. We looked at a type of cookie and its ingredients. I choose a peanut butter cookie that has ten ingredients from all over the world. For starters the sugar of two types, brown and granulated are farmed over 5,000 miles away in Brazil. Most of the other ingredients are from all over the U.S. and South America which had to travel thousands of miles to get to your kitchen in order to make you peanut butter cookies. The only ingredient used in the cookies that originates in California are the eggs. I had no idea how far these ingredients had to travel and it really didn't cross my mind until this activity that most ingredients we use for a regular cookie are not even close to locally grown.

Luke Zlatunich