Over years, like many other people I’ve been buying locally produced food, one of the reasons being the issue of “food miles” – the consideration of how far our food has travelled to get to our plates.

However, Rob Lyons in his article Why there’s no mileage in “food miles” for Spiked, gives , excuse the pun, food for thought.

The trouble with the concept of food miles is that it is not only simple but simple-minded. It even caused a little cat-fight in the green movement a couple of years ago. Outraged members of New Zealand’s Green Party wrote to their British counterparts to protest at the eco-calumny that we shouldn’t buy Kiwi food. “The total greenhouse emissions released in the production and transport of dairy and lamb shipped to Britain from New Zealand are lower than the emissions generated by the production of dairy and lamb in Britain”, declared New Zealand Green Party co-leader, Russel Norman.

Norman pointed to research from Lincoln University in New Zealand which showed that simply counting the miles travelled was little help in assessing the “ecological footprint” of a particular foodstuff. For example, lamb reared on sunny New Zealand pasture and then shipped halfway round the world to the UK creates fewer carbon emissions than meat from animals reared on the rather less luscious grass in the fields of Wales or Scotland. That’s because farmers here in the UK have to add feed to the diets of their animals, feed which is grown using fertilisers and then transported to the farm – all of which emits CO2. There are lots of other examples – like those Spanish tomatoes – where growing food in sunnier climes and then shipping it to Britain uses far fewer resources and emits less pollution than growing crops in less favourable circumstances closer to home.

As Lyons has already amply pointed out things are more complex, one thing I’ve certainly discovered in buying locally is that the quality on offer from our local butcher is far superior to anything the local supermarkets sell.