Dreaming of a green Christmas

Dec. 18, 2005.
STUART LAIDLAW TORONTO STAR

Have yourself a Kyoto-friendly Christmas. Make your yuletide green. Environmentally green.

The holiday season, with its turkey and trimmings, cakes and cookies, is about much more than gifts and gift giving. It's also about food. Lots and lots of food. That's one reason gyms are so busy in January.

But this year, with Canada having recently hosted a pivotal United Nations' climate-change summit in Montreal, it seems fitting to examine the environmental impact of the feast.

Specifically, how much carbon dioxide was spewed into the air to get that feast to your table?

Among environmentalists, thee is a growing discussion of the perceived benefits of locally grown food. It has even led to a fledgling push within the organic food industry to look at how far food travels to our plate.

"Most people don't make the distinction between food and climate change," says Wayne Roberts, policy co-ordinator of the Toronto Food Policy Council, part of the city's board of health. He's among those encouraging consumers to buy more local food to cut down on the carbon emissions they create by simply buying groceries.
The thinking goes like this: if more people buy locally grown food, less will have to be imported. That, in turn, will cut down on the amount of food shipped long distances by truck, plane or boat, all burning fossil fuels and spewing out greenhouse gases.

To test the theory, the Star cooked two meals ??? one with exclusively imported foods, the other with locally grown. We then compared the carbon emissions generated in transporting the foods for the two meals to Toronto.

"It's important to understand your carbon footprint," says Michel Girard, director of climate change at the Canadian Standards Association (CSA), which assisted in our project.

Preparing the meals were Bruce Leslie and Michael Dixon, who will be souschef and chef de cuisine at Jamie Kennedy at the Gardiner, a restaurant opening at the Gardiner Museum in the spring. They currently work with Kennedy at his wine bar on Church St.
The two in-demand chefs donated their fees for the day's work to the Toronto Star Santa Claus Fund. The food they cooked went to the Touchstone Youth Centre in East York.

We cooked only one turkey, since Canada's supply management system virtually ensures that all poultry sold here is raised domestically. We also had both imported and domestic wines, choosing nouveau entries since they are only available at this time of year, and bottled water.

Leslie and Dixon, despite their preference for local foods, agreed to come up with our imported trimmings, choosing a Caribbean theme of mango and ginger chutney, candied Jamaican yams with almonds, fried plantain, creamed spinach, and mandarin oranges ??? all made with exclusively imported items.

Helping put together the local dishes were the nutritionist and the cook at the Big Carrot organic store on Danforth Ave., Julie Daniluk and Katherine Hall. To supply what Daniluk termed a "fun menu" at this time of year, they relied on produce that stores well through the fall and winter ??? meaning a healthy portion of root vegetables.
The local-food offerings: cranberry sauce, rosemary potato pie, roast maple winter vegetables, shredded beet and carrot salad, and baked apple with maple syrup.

The difference between the two meals, with the turkey figured into each, was startling.

Getting the food and wine to our table from Ontario sources resulted in 369 grams of greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere. The imported dishes and wine contributed a whopping 15.71 kilograms ??? 42.6 times the carbon dioxide from the local food.

Our turkey came from a Mennonite farm near Wallenstein, Ont., just outside of Elmira. That's just 117 kilometres away, and in the heart of Ontario's turkey-growing district. Getting the 9.42-kilogram bird to Toronto by truck released 177 grams of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The calculations were done using a website developed with Girard's department at the CSA, which works with companies to figure out their carbon output and find ways to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. The Star's Carbon Counter, a variation on others developed by the CSA so companies can measure their greenhouse gas outputs, is available at http://www.ghgregistries.ca/thestar/news.cfm.

Proponents of local foods like to point out that buying food close to home keeps the money in the province, rather than sending it out of the country.

"There's a multiplier effect," says Stephen Bentley, a graduate student of regional planning at the University of British Columbia researching the impact of local food buying.

"The money stays in the local economy and circles around." Last year, Bentley conducted a study for Toronto's Foodshare, a non-profit food delivery group, comparing the carbon emissions from a lamb dinner made with local produce with one using imported foods, including New Zealand spring lamb.

His results were even more startling than ours.
The imported meal resulted in 100 times the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the air ??? 11.89 kg for his imported meal, compared with 0.12 kg for his local meal.

Most of that was due to the lamb, which was shipped almost 14,000 kilometres to Toronto and led to carbon emissions of 8.4 kilograms, compared with 0.007 kg for the local lamb.

Canada imported $20.4 billion worth of food last year, including $5.8 billion in fruits and vegetables. Most of that was from the United States, including $835 million in food from California alone.
Around the world, international trade in food has tripled in the past 40 years, jumping to $510 billion by 2002, with almost 900 million tonnes of food being shipped from one country to another each year.

The impact of such booming imports and exports can be quite high, Bentley says.

For instance, he found that carrots from California contributed 840 grams of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, compared with 15 grams for carrots grown in Millgrove, Ont.
Canada imported more than $98 million worth of carrots from the U.S. last year.

Daniluk at the Big Carrot says Canada need not import so much food, though she confesses a weakness for pineapples and avocados.

Root vegetables can be stored and sold all year long, she says, giving a nice alternative to the lighter, more watery vegetables eaten in the summer.

And while greenhouses are already a big industry in Ontario, providing local vegetables almost all year round, she adds, more could be done such as putting greenhouses on rooftops in the middle of the big Toronto market.

One City of Toronto study is already looking at the potential of such enterprises, which could have environmental benefits and give people guilt-free leafy vegetables at any time of the year.

In Daniluk's words: "You can have your lettuce and eat it, too."