Food miles are giving consumers a whole new way to look
a product and they could affect the way people buy flowers in the
future.
The term food miles (or food kilometres in Canada) originated in Britain and is used to evaluate the distance a product travels from the grower to the consumer. Since the term became popular two years ago, millions of Britons have started to examine the products they purchase by looking at an item’s food miles. The idea is that the longer a product travels, the more pollution is created through air freight or road transportation.
For the environmentally concerned shopper, food miles are an easy way to choose eco-friendly products. Food miles originally began with food, but can also be applied to any product that travels a long distance to the consumer, including flowers.
In Canada, the movement hasn’t caught on yet, but there are a few organizations that are trying to raise the profile of food miles. The Sierra Club of Canada is one and another is the British Columbia-based LifeCycles Project.
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