The Food Miles and CO2 Emissions of Producing America's Favorite Meals [Infographic]

By the time that food gets to your plate, an exhaustive amount of emissions have been flung into the atmosphere in order for it to get there. How much? We’ve taken a deeper look into food miles and overall emissions to find out how we can save our planet. Part of the conversation centers around food miles, or the average miles food needs to travel between farm and consumer.

There’s a huge difference between a locally sourced apple from your local farmstand on the corner and the groceries sourced from countries across the world like China, New Zealand, The Netherlands, and Mexico. In some cases, it’s a difference of 1,800 miles! That’s thousands of miles in plane travel, shipping, or trucking, which all leads to carbon emissions.

The second part of the conversation is about food production emissions, which is how much simply generating the food creates emissions on the farm. In many cases, the production emissions simply dwarf food miles, especially in the cases of beef and chicken.


Infographic by: www.teletracnavman.com