For years, "food miles" has been shorthand for environmental virtue. Buy local, the logic goes, and you cut the emissions from trucking, shipping, and flying your dinner across the continent. It's an intuitive idea. It's also, according to the last two decades of climate research, not always the case- or at least far more complicated than it suggests.
If you care about the actual footprint of what you eat, the distance it travelled is not the only factor that needs to be taken into consideration.
The foundational research on this goes back to a 2008 study by Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews, which broke down the full lifecycle emissions of the average US diet. Their finding, since replicated by multiple independent groups, was stark: transportation accounts for a little under a tenth of total food-related emissions, while production- growing, raising, processing- accounts for roughly 83%.
Later work, including the widely cited 2018 Science paper by Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek analysing nearly 40,000 farms across 119 countries, confirmed the same pattern at global scale. What you eat matters enormously. How far it travelled to reach you is, on average, has less of a negative impact.
The clearest illustration is the "greenhouse tomato problem." A tomato grown in a heated glasshouse in the Netherlands or northern Germany can carry a heavier carbon footprint than one grown in open fields in southern Spain and trucked a thousand kilometres north- because heating and lighting a greenhouse through a northern European winter is far more energy-intensive than the diesel burned in transit. Distance loses to climate and growing method, repeatedly.
Where the "food miles" critics have a point
This doesn't mean transport is irrelevant, and a 2022 study published in Nature Food pushed back hard on treating it as negligible. By modelling the entire supply chain, including the transport of fertiliser, animal feed, and machinery, not just the final product- the researchers estimated global food-miles emissions at roughly 3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent, 3.5 to 7.5 times higher than earlier estimates, and closer to 19% of total food-system emissions rather than the ~10% figure long assumed. Scary figures indeed.
The same research found that wealthy nations, representing only around an eighth of the world's population, are responsible for roughly half of international food-miles emissions. And transport matters far more for specific categories: fruit and vegetables, which are perishable and often air-freighted, account for over a third of food-miles emissions, nearly double what's generated growing them in the first place.
So the honest, non-marketing-friendly version of the science looks like this:
- For carbon-intensive foods (meat and dairy especially), production so overwhelmingly dominates the footprint that where it came from barely moves the needle.
- For perishable, air-freighted produce (soft fruit, asparagus, green beans out of season), transport mode and distance genuinely matter.
- For processed and preserved foods- tinned, cured, fermented, aged- the picture shifts again: production efficiency, ingredient sourcing, and packaging tend to dominate, and sea or road freight has a far smaller footprint per tonne than air freight.
The single biggest lever available to almost anyone, across nearly every study on this topic, remains shifting the type of food consumed- we need to eat less meat and dairy, and more plant-based staples.
Why this matters for how we think about "buying local"
This is worth being upfront about: distance alone isn't a reliable proxy for environmental impact, and a slogan like "local is greener" doesn't survive contact with the data in every case. What the research consistently rewards instead is a fuller picture- how something was grown or raised, how it was processed, how it was transported, and how much of it goes to waste along the way.
That's a much harder story to tell than "it came from nearby," but it's the one that's actually true.
What Euporium does with this
We don't concentrate solely on "local" as a shorthand for sustainable, and choose to focus on multiple elements including limiting food-miles to move the needle. Provenance at Euporium is built around the following:
- Traditional, low-input production methods. Makers like Papa Anzóis (hand-packed Portuguese sardines) and Agricola Maraviglia (Tuscan olive oil) use production processes that predate industrial intensification- lower energy input per unit, not just shorter distance.
- Preservation over perishability. Tinned fish, cured products, and slow-processed staples carry a fundamentally different and generally lower transport-emissions profile than air-freighted fresh produce, because they move by road on long timelines rather than urgent cold-chain logistics.
- Short, direct supply chains within Europe. Cutting out intermediary distribution layers reduces handling, refrigeration, and repackaging emissions, and we focus on Europe only to limit food-miles but also support our European traditions and communities.
- Full transparency on origin and method, so customers can make an informed call rather than relying on a "local" or "European" label to do the thinking for them.
The honest version of sustainable sourcing isn't a single number on a map. It's a maker who grows or catches with care, a process that doesn't waste energy, and a supply chain with as few needless steps as possible. That's the standard we hold every product on Euporium to.