Where does our food come from?

This week in class we focused on determining how far our food travels before it gets to our plate. To do this, we took a look at cookies and each of their ingredients' origins. I chose the chocolate chip cookie specifically, and with 9 ingredients there was a lot of stuff to calculate. First, we looked at where our ingredients are native to. For example, Brown Sugar comes from Brazil, Chocolate comes from West Africa, and our other ingredients all had their own native places. We totaled up the distance from those places with the ingredients and added them up at the end. We did this again and looked into local ingredient replacements, such as getting butter from a Clover farm in Petaluma instead of getting it from Minnesota. We added the distances up for each ingredient in the cookie and determined that in order for us to eat one chocolate chip cookie, over 21000 miles of ground had to be covered. Compare this to the 5500+ miles that would be covered with the local options and it is clear that we need to consider where we are getting our ingredients from because it can and will make a difference.

- Jared Robinow