Food miles

When we buy vegetables or fruits we don't really care where they are grown. Those items might have been grown in different parts of the country or sometimes they might have been imported from other countries. All we consider while buying is the price, the freshness in their looks and the availability of a particular item in the market through out the year. We wouldn't mind paying more price to buy mangoes if they are available off the season.

In reality what happens when we ask for mangoes after the mango season is over? This puts pressure on the market and the market players tend to source it from other places to meet the demand. Another motivating factor for the suppliers is the extra price they get from selling items in off-seasons. These food items have to travel long distances to meet our off season demands. Food miles is the distance travelled by a food item to reach the consumer's plate. It's often referred as 'from the plough to the plate'.

A report published by The Guardian newspaper found that a selection of 20 fresh food items purchased from British supermarkets had travelled an average of 5,000 miles each. Look at these numbers: grapes had travelled 7,247 miles, carrots and peas 5,979 miles and Apples had travelled 10,133 miles before being consumed by people. In the USA, on average, each food item travels 1,500 miles before arriving at consumer's tables. This travel burns huge amounts of fossil fuels. Farmers also employ inorganic ways to improve the travel life and durability of vegetable and fruits. Sometimes this comes at a cost of the quality and taste of the food item. This report gives some astonishing facts.

It's not this worse in India though. But any travel by a food item is a waste of energy.

Radish is probably the most consumed vegetable in Madras due to its importance in making a sambaar. But a large volume of radish consumed in this port city comes from a village called Sheegehalli in the Kolar district of Karnataka. On average this village transports about 4-5 lorries of fresh radish to Chennai everyday. This radish travels around 270-300 Kilometers and takes about 7-8 hours approximately before being part of the delicious sambaar.

I also know a few places who do intelligent sourcing. For example FoodWorld in Bangalore source baby corn from Hosakote which is about 25 Kilometers away and just takes about 1 hour to reach its stores. Most of the vegetable shops in towns and villages source their vegetables from local farmers. Even if we are buying less good looking items from these shops at least we are sure the vegetables we are consuming are not emitting carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. They are genuinely fresh looking as opposed to chemically fed containers during the travel.

While travelling we must have seen the roadside vendors selling vegetables and fruits. This is the freshest quality we can get without burning a single calorie of fossil fuel as food miles.

Next time when I go to the vegetable shop, I am thinking of asking him how far a vegetable has travelled before reaching his shop and what was its place of origin!!

Saving Tank Water From Evaporating

I visited a colleague's home for the easter weekend. He has a lovely house in the Manly suburbs. We had a very long break for work. He was very kind to invite me. Otherwise it would've been really hard for me to spend the 4th day without doing anything. I took a ferry from the circular quay to Manly. Its a great experience to travel in these ferries.

My colleague's house (he is my CEO!) is well equipped with all the needs. While surveying the house I noticed their swimming pool was covered in a blue rubber sheet. When I asked him why they covered it, he mentioned they had limited supply of water. If they fill the pool and leave it for a couple of weeks, all the water would evaporate and they had to fill the water again. Then they found out this solution of covering the whole pool with a rubber sheet. The local water bodies gave them this solution. This rubber sheet would look like the waste left after making hawaii chappals. This solution solved their water evaporation problems completely apart from protecting the pool and water from dust and waste material. Whenever they need to use the pool they just remove the cover, use the pool and cover it back again.

• Minimise the cooling of the pool by stopping evaporation and convection heat loss. This occures mainly during the night when the ambient air temperature drops below the temperature of the water in the pool. By creating a barrier between the water surface and the outside air, these losses are virtually eliminated.

• By keeping evaporation to a minimum, you not only save water, (approx 1.5 metres per year in the Sydney Metropolitan Area), but you also save on the cost of chemicals as you dont have to re balance you pool after topping up. It also reduces the amount of chlorine lost to the Suns’ UV Rays.
  
  
• Blankets keep the pool cleaner - about 80% to 90% of debris is kept out of the pool. This reduces the work load of your pool cleaner. Most types of pool cleaners will work quite happily under the blanket.

• Reduces pool heating costs by up to 50%. Even the cost of running solar system pumps is saved by reducing the amount of heat loss from the pool. Effectively 90% of heat loss is from the surface of the pool. By using a blanket in conjuction with Gas, Electric or Solar heating systems, significant energy cost savings can be made.
  
  
• Extend the swimming season. Even without other forms of heating on the pool, the addition of a pool blanket can result in a temperature increase of from 6 to 8 degrees in a pool that has a sunny aspect.

All these benefits are pretty good to the swimming pool owner.

But covering a pool with these sheet is an expensive affair. It costs considerable maintenance costs as well along with the high initial setup costs.

At my village we have a borewell and my father pumps it into a storage tank so that he need not depend on electricity to water his crops. But what he hasn't realised is, he is loosing huge amounts of water to evaporation and ground percolation. There are other problems as well. Most of these problems are same as the swimming pool owners. However, they have a solution now.

How about making this an expensive solution, alter it suitably to suit Indian conditions and apply it to my father's farming storage tank? Well I am working on that will post as soon as I have a workable solution.