What are food miles and do they matter?
- Alex Leigh
- Nov 24, 2025
- 4 min read
If you’re interested in reducing your carbon footprint, you might have done some research and come across the term “food miles”. Firstly, you are right to be thinking about tweaking your diet! You can make huge carbon emissions reductions by focussing on your food purchases as I explored in this blog.
After deciding to focus on food, where should you start? What are food miles, and are they worth obsessing over?
What are food miles?
“Food miles” are, simply put, how many miles a food has travelled to get to your plate. This distance travelled can include many parts, and we do not always include all of them when we talk about food miles.
There may be some distance that the seeds have to travel before they are planted. For meat products, this might be the distance between where the animal is born to where it lives out its life.
Then, once the product is grown, it may travel to a factory to be processed or packaged.
After that, it needs to travel to the shop where you can purchase it.
Finally, after you’ve bought it, you need to get it home.
When people discuss "food miles," they usually only count the distance from farm to shop or factory to shop.
Are all food miles created equal?
If your raspberries have travelled to the UK from Morocco, and your grapes have come from Peru, the raspberries surely have a much lower carbon footprint, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple!
There are three main ways that food travels around the world: by sea (cargo ships), by plane (air freight), or by trucks or lorries on the road. These three modes of transport have wildly different emissions. A trip made by plane has around 47 times the carbon emissions as the same trip made by sea. A truck has 10 times the emissions.
Armed with this information, we could now say that if the raspberries have been flown to us, but the grapes came from Peru by boat, the raspberries actually have a much higher carbon footprint. As a consumer, how do we know how a product was transported around the world? Oftentimes, we don’t, but there are some rules of thumb to help us make a good guess…
How can we reduce food miles?
As mentioned in this blog, if a food goes off quickly but has travelled a long way, it must have gotten here quickly. Therefore, it was probably flown here. If a food lasts a while, they probably had the time to ship it over to us. This is much better for the planet!
The best we can do if the mode of transport isn't on the packaging is to make a best guess. The diagram below is a helpful reference if you need to make a judgement in the supermarket.
How important are food miles to reducing our carbon footprints?
The carbon footprint of a food is made up of many things, as detailed in this blog. The way it is transported can be a big part of this calculation, particularly if it has been flown to us. However, other factors are sometimes more important, like whether the food was grown in an artificially-heated greenhouse, or whether the food naturally emits greenhouse gases like methane, like red meat and dairy does.
All the factors going into a product's total carbon footprint are a balancing act. Sometimes, if a brand is doing great work, they will show the carbon footprint of their product on the packaging, like Oatly. Most of the time, the carbon footprint of a product is unclear.
Food waste and packaging matter too. All the effort minimising food miles could be offset if the food ultimately ends up in landfill! Alongside buying the right things, make sure you're using and disposing of them consciously too.
So, what should I do?
This is a complex area, so first things first, don’t be too hard on yourself. You don’t need to be perfect; just do your best. With that in mind, try the following:
If you’re choosing between two items from different parts of the world, use our diagram to make your best guess about the mode of transport, and choose the one that you think was shipped by boat.
Choose products that are in season in the UK as they’re more likely to have been locally produced without the need of artificially-heated greenhouses. We've written a blog about eating seasonally here.
Use a tool like EcoTweaks which takes into account the total carbon footprint of foods on your shopping list to suggest similar alternatives for you that have lower carbon emissions.
Over time, if we prove to industry that we care, supply chain information is likely to become more readily available. In an ideal world, alongside the country of origin, packaging should also include how a food was transported to us. Until then, we can continue to make our best guesses and buy with the planet in mind. Individual action in this area really does add up.
Sources
EcoTweaks®, Cozy Mae Studios Ltd
MIT News (Nov 2010) The 6-percent solution, available at: https://news.mit.edu/2010/corporate-greenhouse-gas-1108 (accessed Nov 2025)
