Small steps

I am looking at all angles of our food's carbon impact now, and the research is showing up some suprising and sometimes quite disturbing & counter-intuative information.

For example, which is environmentally better (for a UK resident):

a) buying UK produced lamb
b) buying New Zealand produced lamb

Aha, I hear you say. That's easy, the UK lamb as you don't have to transport it halfway around the world. You'd be wrong.

New Zealand lamb is fed purely on grass and clover growing on the hills and mountains, wheras farming methods in the UK mean that animal feed (produced using a suprising amount of petrochemicals) is used in the UK. Also, a suprising amount of electricty is used in farming, and a great deal of electricity is produced in New Zealand using hydro-electric rather than the mainly fossil-fuelled UK. The result being that UK produced lamb has a larger carbon impact than the stuff produced in far-away lands and shipped halfway around he world.

(note: this difference may evaporate once we clean up our energy generating capability in the UK)

Anyway - the small step (of the title of this post) is that the wife has managed to source, from our local farm shop, flour that is produced within a ten mile radius of our house. So at least our bread is now mostly local....

Enrico