The politics of snow peas

When even the Archbishop of Canterbury has an opinion on food miles, you know the issue is reaching the highest authority. But are his concerns valid? Jude Gillies reports.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years it would be hard to escape the hype around food miles.

Eating food from far away places, using up valuable fossil fuels in production and transport, is something we are told is socially and morally irresponsible.

Now the Archbishop of Canterbury has joined the food politics bandwagon, recently calling on the gardeners of Britain to stop eating snow peas imported from Africa and instead to grow their own food by digging for victory over the evil of carbon footprints and food miles to help save the planet.

To most of us it would seem a reasonable thing to do, especially where the greater good of saving our only planet is involved.

But, inevitably, as is the way with politics, the flip side to the Archbishop's argument was that the snow pea producers of Africa cried out that their markets would disappear and with them their hard-won livelihoods and independence.

Welcome to world trade, something humans have probably been doing as long as they have been eating.

You might like to think you can do your bit in the fight against food miles by growing your own fresh, seasonal produce, but what about those other ingredients inside in your kitchen cupboard?

How many packets of rice or pasta do you have and where did they come from?

Even if the pasta happened to be made here in New Zealand, where was the durum wheat grown to make it?

And how many times a week do you eat rice imported from elsewhere? If the whole of New Zealand stopped eating rice it might not make a dent to the income of the rice growers of Asia, but if enough people around the world stopped eating rice it just might make a difference.

Then there's your tea and coffee. Try as you might, and indeed some keen types in Motueka did a few years ago, growing a drinkable cup of tea here is not easy.

And although you might just be able to grow a coffee plant that produces a few fragrant flowers and a handful of beans, you're certainly not going to grow enough to satisfy your daily caffeine fix.

Which is why whole cultures and nations have traded and even fought wars over such essential items as tea, salt, pepper, coffee, chilli and chocolate.

Take another look at the food inside your fridge or out in the garden and contemplate how it got there.

The tomatoes in the can or your pasta sauce originally came from the Americas, along with corn, chillies, potatoes, cocoa, beans and even turkeys.

Aubergine, along with basil and several other common culinary herbs, started out on the Indian subcontinent.

Citrus plants, once regarded as Asian, are now thought to have started out in tropical Australia when it was part of ancient Gondwanaland.

And the journey of kumara from South America to our shores is convoluted, carried by Maori via the Pacific.

Long before the term food miles was invented andwhen the energy source to produce and transport it may have been different and renewable (sun and wind), people have always traded.

Renowned Kiwi chef abroad Peter Gordon defends his passion for fusion cuisine as simply being an extension of what keen cooks have done for centuries – finding and using new and exotic flavours.

But why should anyone, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, stop at measuring just food in carbon footprints and miles? What about all the other goods you use daily in life? Where did your computer and its components come from? Your running shoes, car, cotton T-shirt, sunglasses, lipstick, heart pills and vodka?

Food, and fresh food in particular, seems to be an easy target to bag over food miles. But, as researchers at Lincoln University revealed a couple of years ago from a study comparing New Zealand-produced lamb with that from Britain, ours has a smaller carbon footprint, even after being shipped to Britain.

Such is the complex and confusing minefield of defining and measuring carbon footprints and food miles.

True, it's surely a worthy cause, for lots of reasons, to grow or buy local produce, such as that promoted by the farmers' markets philosophy.

However, the notion of eating or using only local products flies in the face of so-called free trade and globalisation, which, of course, is not without its opponents.

And for good reasons.

Apple growers in Nelson know only too well that non-tariff barriers, such as biosecurity red herrings, to free trade can be used to protect domestic markets.

While Australia has a free trade agreement with New Zealand that would supposedly allow us to export our apples, access continues to be denied on biosecurity grounds that many here believe are spurious.

If free trade allows lamb importation to Britain in competition with local farmers, what better way of appealing to the British conscience and protecting the locally produced lamb than alerting the people there to the evil of food miles embedded in the imported product.

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but how soon will it be before the term food miles is lost among the hype of another new scare-mongering term used as a non-tariff barrier to trade.

And, given the plethora of imported foodstuffs we consume on a daily basis, trade is going to be around for a long time to come.

The Archbishop of Canterbury may want his constituents to grow their own snow peas, but I'll bet he still takes his tea from India.

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