In a world where eating exotic avocados in a New York café or savoring sushi-grade tuna in a European bistro has become the norm, it's easy to forget the incredible distances food travels to reach our plates. Global food sourcing allows us to enjoy a wide variety of foods year-round, but it comes with hidden costs: environmental degradation, loss of local food culture, and health impacts. Let's dive into the journey food takes from around the world to our favorite restaurants and explore why eating locally sourced food is not just a trend, but a crucial step toward a sustainable future.
The Journey to Takeout Pizza
It is estimated that one-third of Americans eat pizza at least once a week with a total of over 156 slices consumed each year by the average American. Given how much we love pizza, we can use this to illustrate the difference that eating locally sourced ingredients can make. When you bite into a slice of pizza, it’s easy to forget the long journey each ingredient took to get there. Let's explore the miles these ingredients travel, from farm to factory to our plates, using Our Common Table’s headquarters in Baltimore, MD as the final destination.
In this blog post, we’ll follow the path of a classic Margherita pizza, focusing on four key ingredients: flour for the crust, tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and fresh basil. By understanding this process, we can gain insight into the environmental impact of global food sourcing, particularly the “food miles” associated with our meals.
The Base
The start to all great pizzas is the crust. Wheat is a staple for making the flour in pizza dough. Kansas, known as the “Wheat State,” produces around one-fifth of all U.S. wheat. After harvesting in Kansas, the wheat needs to be transported to a milling factory (let’s consider one in St. Louis, Missouri) before it’s processed into flour. This starts our pizza recipe off with around 1,200 miles traveled from farm to table.
The Sauce
Next, consider a traditional pizza sauce recipe. Tomato sauce is an essential component of any pizza. For our Margherita pizza, we’ll source tomatoes from California’s Central Valley, the heart of the U.S. tomato industry. This region is responsible for around 90% of all tomatoes processed for sauces, pastes, and canned goods nationwide. Once harvested, these tomatoes are transported to a processing facility in Sacramento, where they’re transformed into the thick, tangy sauce that will be spread over our pizza dough. This leg of the journey adds 2,950 to our pizza’s total mileage.
The Cheese
Leprino Foods is the world’s largest mozzarella cheese producer, producing billions of dollars worth of cheese each year, so we can use them as an example in our fictional pizza production. The company is based in Denver, Colorado and manufactures much of its cheese in a few major hubs throughout the United States. To be the world’s largest mozzarella producer, Leprino relies on a lot of farms to produce milk, many of which are close to factories like DeHaan’s dairy farm in Ault, Colorado. In order to get the milk to Leprino to make cheese, it travels around 75 miles from farm to factory. Once it has transformed into pizza’s favorite cheese, the mozzarella has to travel around 1,600 miles from the factory to Our Common Table’s headquarters in Baltimore. This brings our conventional pizza tally to around 5,750.
The Toppings
Basil adds that aromatic, fresh finishing touch to a Margherita pizza. While it could be locally grown, let’s consider large-scale commercial basil farms in south Florida. These farms provide a steady year-round supply of fresh herbs. Once harvested, the basil is sent to a packaging facility in Miami, where it’s prepared for distribution. Fresh herbs like basil are often flown or trucked rapidly to avoid spoilage, leading to more emissions. Moreover, packaging materials like plastic clamshells or bags add to the environmental cost, especially if they aren’t recycled. From south Florida to Baltimore, our basil adds 1,200 miles to the tally.
The Environmental Impact
Those 6,950 miles are just for a simple Margherita pizza! The environmental cost includes carbon emissions from transportation, energy consumption for processing, and potential waste. While it’s easy to forget the complex supply chain behind everyday meals, understanding food miles can help us make more informed choices, like supporting local producers to reduce this impact.
Bringing It Closer to Home
While food miles are only one piece of the sustainability puzzle, they’re a significant one. Transportation accounts for a substantial share of greenhouse gas emissions within the food supply chain. Moving goods long distances requires fuel, whether by truck, rail, or plane, contributing to carbon emissions that accelerate climate change.
Beyond the emissions, each step in the supply chain introduces potential waste—whether it’s spoilage, excess packaging, or energy used during processing. The more complex and widespread the food system, the more these inefficiencies add up. For example:
Fuel Consumption: The trucks, trains, and planes moving our food rely heavily on fossil fuels.
Energy Use in Processing: From milling wheat to processing tomatoes, significant energy is required.
Packaging Waste: The need for extended shelf life often results in excessive or non-recyclable packaging.
The Case for Eating Local: Rebuilding Our Food Economy
The solution isn’t to entirely shun foods from distant lands but to rethink the balance between global and local sourcing. To make a more sustainable, locally sourced pizza, we can travel to the 32nd Street Farmers Market on Saturday to shop for the following ingredients to make our own pizza.
For the crust, we can visit our friends over at Doppio Pasticceria who source their wheat from Pennsylvania. This adds around 50 miles to our pizza’s journey.
For our sauce, we can pick up some in-season, local tomatoes and basil from One Straw Farm. Since both of these ingredients are traveling from the farm to the market together, we can add 35 miles to our running total for each ingredient.
For our cheese, we can stop by Broom’s Bloom Dairy which is based in Bel Air. This adds 33 miles, bringing our total local pizza to 118 miles traveled from farm to table. That means that our local pizza uses 61x fewer miles to get from farm to table. Talk about a big impact!
Shortening the Supply Chain: Local Solutions
This pizza example underscores the environmental benefits of supporting local and regional food systems. While it’s not always possible to buy locally for every ingredient, reducing the miles food travels by purchasing from nearby farms and producers can help lessen our carbon footprint. Not to mention the economic advantages for your community.
The convenience of a modern, globalized food system allows us to enjoy diverse foods year-round. But that convenience comes at an environmental cost, as seen through the lens of food miles. As consumers, being aware of where our food comes from and choosing locally when possible can help reduce that impact.
Next time you bite into a slice of pizza, remember the cross-country journey each ingredient took—and consider how supporting local food systems can lower those miles (and the associated environmental costs) and reap the benefits much closer to home.
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