In the early years of transportation, farmers were faced with a big issue: the moment food was harvested it began to spoil. Trade has been around, it is believed, as long as civilization has been. The Egyptian civilization kicked off a solution to this problem with their method of transporting goods along the Nile to deliver to nearby communities.
Still, they were racing against the clock to deliver food within its expiration window. It wasn’t until the 19th century that things really began to change with the introduction of canning and cooling methods.
During this time, amphora were often used. These have been around since as early as the Neolithic period and were often tall ceramic containers transported food, though mostly wine.
How those handy, refrigeration trucks work
Refrigeration trucks contain a few key elements that keep everything cool: the compressor, condenser, and the evaporator. A refrigeration system is attached to the outside of the truck’s unit and contains the compressor and condenser. The compressor compresses a gaseous refrigerant, liquefying the gas which heats the body of the compressor and surrounding air.
Today, food travels many miles before it comes together to make your dinner. If you think about it, it’s almost like you’re eating in a different city or even country every time you sit down to eat a meal.
Do you know how far your food has traveled to reach your dinner table?
These days we’re able to head down to the supermarket and purchase a vast array of foods from all over the world, no longer restricted by local environmental factors and/or the seasonality of a product: you can get flowers from Africa, fruit from Europe, snacks from Asia and spices from South America. Today retailers can source food from wherever it is cheapest around the globe at the touch of a computer key.
These luxuries come at many unseen costs, thanks to the carbon emissions as a result of the production and use chemicals, the raising of livestock, the highly mechanized means of production, and the transportation, processing, packaging and retailing of food products.
But to meet this demand, our food is transported further than ever before, often by air. That makes it a major contributor to greenhouse emissions and climate change. It also means a heavy dependence on a resource that is not only finite but also highly politically-charged: oil. So our food supply is more vulnerable than before.
In many cases, Western society routinely purchases food that was grown more than 1000 miles away and transported to the local grocery store. While food prices in the store are relatively inexpensive, the environmental cost of transporting your food is often very high. Trucks, trains, and boats, all of which consume fossil fuels, are the primary methods for transporting large quantities of food around the world. Additionally, the transportation of these goods causes an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Many people are becoming aware of the impact that food mileage has on the environment and are choosing alternative food purchase options to reduce the distance that their food must travel to reach their plates.
Food miles
The concept of food miles, the distance food travels before being consumed, dates back to a 1994 report called “The Food Mile: The dangers of long-distance food transport”.
The term ‘food miles’ refers to the total geographic distance food is transported between their cultivation, processing and to the consumer at the point of sale. Put simply, it’s way of measuring how far your food had to travel to get to your plate.
In general, the contribution of food transportation relative to the total greenhouse gas emissions of a given food product represents a small percentage of the carbon footprint for many foods. Fresh foods transported by air freight can have significant distribution-related carbon impacts, but on average, distribution of finished foods (from farm or factory to retail stores) contributes less than 4%, on average, of the greenhouse gas emissions of foods consumed in the U.S.Another challenge with relying on “food miles” as an indicator of greenhouse gas emissions or other environmental impacts is that often, the mode of transport (air, road, rail, and water) etc.
