World Food Day: Thinking Outside the Vegetable Box

The last time I was in London, I picked up a packet of extra fine green beans from a Tesco supermarket. The label, which I kept and which has been sitting on my desk ever since, intrigued me. The amount of information packed on to this small sticker reminds me of how complex the debates around our global food supply have become.

And today, on World Food Day, it's worth pausing to think about how some of those debates impact the lives of the people the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization intended us to remember on October 16: the millions around the world without enough to eat.

The Tesco label has all bases covered, it seems. First, we are given instructions on storing and preparing the beans. Then there's information about their nutritional value and how many calories would be in half the pack, which we are informed is one of "5-a-day" (this I assume is how many portions of vegetables should be in a healthy daily diet). We're also told how much sugar, fat, saturates and salt the beans contain.

Then it gets more interesting. In the bottom left hand corner, there's a little blue circle with a picture of an airplane on it and the words "by air." Some years ago, food companies would label products flown by air as a way of denoting their freshness. But Tesco's little airplane symbol has another meaning. The idea is that if we're worried about our carbon emissions, we might think twice about buying things flown in by air.

The sticker will appeal to those who highlight the cost to the planet of long-distance food, with many suggesting we stick to a "100-mile"diet of locally produced food in order to reduce the carbon emissions associated with transporting food across the world.

Some, however, are starting to point out that, when it comes to carbon emissions, transport is only a small part of the problem and we should looking far more broadly at the environmental impact of food production.

And surely, given the huge volumes carbon dioxide emitted by industrial agriculture and the vast amounts of water it uses, we should use a broader measure when deciding where to buy food from, looking not at distance traveled but at the environmental sustainability of the farming practices and processing techniques used to produce it.

However, there is another element to the local-global food debate that is particularly relevant on World Food Day. This year, the FAO is encouraging us to think about "the role of human rights in eradicating hunger and poverty, and hastening and deepening the sustainable development process."

This idea of "deepening the sustainable development process" is perhaps what gets forgotten in the local-global food debates. For while we might deny ourselves the packet of beans to help cut our carbon footprint, that packet of beans is part of an industry that has created tens of thousand of jobs in the horticulture industry in African countries such as Kenya and Uganda.

Even this argument has been captured on the Tesco label. "Meet one of our growers, Elizabeth Nduta who works for a small scale Kenya farm who have grown extra fine beans in the rural highland areas of Kenya for over 15 years," reads some text next to a picture of a smiling Kenyan woman.

Eating locally produced food helps support local farmers, say proponents of the 100-mile diet. But, as the picture of Elizabeth Nduta reminds us, there are "local" farmers in other countries whose livelihoods depend on the export of fruit and vegetables and who surely deserve at least some of our business.