“Interested in eating less oil? In this VideoNation/Hidden Driver report, animator Molly Schwartz keeps track of how many miles your food travels from field to fork.” (video opens YouTube in a new window)
I like that the (very cute & well designed) video brings up some of the other environmental factors besides food miles that eating locally helps to address – packaging and processing. When you bring your own bag to the farmers’ market or farm stand (I keep a couple totes in the car and near the door), you can get out of there with lots of food and very little packaging indeed – no more layers of cellophane, cardboard, more plastic. And most of the food is in its raw, unprocessed form. The book Twinkie, Deconstructed was enormously insightful for me – I learned a lot about the amount of energy needed to create processed foods. Sort of unbelievable how many factories and how much processing goes into a lot of everyday sorts of foods, let alone the super-processed Twinkies.