Introduction - GEOG 201-001 F2020 - Food and Society

About this LibGuide

This LibGuide is designed to assist students in GEOG 201-001 F2020 to access and use Statistics Canada, Government of Canada, and Government of British Columbia, datasets and spatial data. In addition, it provides access to Agricultural and Food related information and Data, World Maps, and recommended research Databases to be used in for completing their assignments.

According to the Cambridge dictionary food miles is ‘‘the distance between the place where food is grown or made and the place where it is eaten’’. Professor Tim Lang first introduced the ‘’food miles’’ concept at the Sustainable Agriculture Food and Environment (SAFE) Alliance, in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom.

Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers
Food's environmental impacts are created by millions of diverse producers. To identify solutions that are effective under this heterogeneity, we consolidated data covering five environmental indicators; 38,700 farms; and 1600 processors, packaging types, and retailers. Impact can vary 50-fold among producers of the same product, creating substantial mitigation opportunities. However, mitigation is complicated by trade-offs, multiple ways for producers to achieve low impacts, and interactions throughout the supply chain. Producers have limits on how far they can reduce impacts. Most strikingly, impacts of the lowest-impact animal products typically exceed those of vegetable substitutes, providing new evidence for the importance of dietary change. Cumulatively, our findings support an approach where producers monitor their own impacts, flexibly meet environmental targets by choosing from multiple practices, and communicate their impacts to consumers.