I’m looking for simple suggestions as to how I could further reduce our larder’s ecological footprint, reducing food miles, greenhouse emissions and making Bellis more sustainable.

The cost of food is intimately linked to the cost of oil so prices are rising and I have a tight budget. Last month I listed all the products in the larder from agar agar to veggie sausages. I recorded them by name and, if possible, where the manufacturer said they were made. Lax Australian labelling laws make tracing origins difficult.

At primary school we did a similar exercise thirty odd years ago in Britain. Each pupil used a map of the world where coloured threads connected London to the various places where their families’ food originated.

The muffin-shaped graphic (above) works clockwise, starting with 100% Australian grown/ manufactured goods with the fewest food miles (coloured purple). Next come products containing both Australian and imported goods, and so on. The last muffin segment, where origins were declared ‘imported’, I assumed travelled the most food miles.

The ‘imported’ 10% are mostly herbs and spices. Some I grow here. Others, like sage, I can’t successfully grow.

You can also go too far. Indonesia is the world centre of clove production. I’d rather buy them in a fruit shop or do without than plant one of these large, thirsty evergreen tropical trees in a subtropical garden in an attempt to shave one minor item off my larder’s footprint. A line has to be drawn somewhere.

Another dead end was a suggestion by housemate Damo that I grow the ingredients found in his Mens’ Health multivitamins. A simple check of the ingredients revealed they included saw palmetto from seed of the slow growing warm climate palm, Serenoa repens. Native to the USA and uncommonly grown in Australia, getting viable seed and then waiting for one to produce seed might take a decade or more. The prospect of cropping ginkgo seed (Ginkgo biloba), another key ingredient, is quite ludicrous. This temperate species is not suited to the coastal subtropics, this tree takes years to flower, and you must have a male and a female (and the space) to grow multiple trees in the attempt. I’d rather eat well, avoid the expense of multivitamins altogether and keep my sanity…

What I’ve already done:

• The biggest footprint reduction comes from growing your own food. Even in ongoing drought, I grow 70% of the fresh fruit, vegetables, herbs and spices required. I still buy rice, bread, pasta, etc, and spend $10 per person per day on shopping for three people;
• A lot of petrol is wasted on convenience – short, one-off shopping trips. Like buying a six-pack of beer. I shop less frequently. Jeff bought a recycled bike for quick trips to the bakery;
• More petrol is wasted by importing fresh food that’s already produced in Australia. So I buy locally grown and organic locally grown where possible. Organic food production uses less petrol than industrial food. Organic farming sequesters carbon too;
• Curiously enough San Remo pasta spirals and fettucine are Australian grown, but its lasagne sheets come from Sri Lanka. Checking labels is worthwhile. Tinned, dried or bottled food, shipped by sea, has long been known to be economical in its use of space and petrol; Assessing food miles started in Britain during the food and oil shortages of World War II;
• Buying refrigerated fresh foreign food wastes the most petrol. Out of season supermarket  strawberries fly to Australia business class from South America. Rising oil prices will make this economic and ecological absurdity abundantly clear at the checkout;

Meanwhile I’m working on that yellow 10% – I bought a herb drier and a mortar and pestle for producing more and better home grown herbs. I can’t grow every ingredient required to make curry powder, but I can certainly grow the spices required to make a curry base. And without displacing staple foods from the food garden too!

Suggestions for improving our larders’ ecological footprint are welcome.

Have a rummage through our larder here – larder footprint

Jerry Coleby-Williams
9th June 2008