Late for the table….Carbon footprints

I’m in England right now on holiday (as they say here…) so that’s this week’s excuse for having a (really) late column…. But as I was flying over here last week on the plane, knowing that rather large amounts of fuel were being used to transport me across the ocean, I started to think about my carbon footprint. And as I sit in the sun by the Thames in Richmond writing this, with planes overhead flying into Heathrow (and probably dumping fuel on my head…), I’m wondering about all of our carbon – or environmental – footprints on the planet.

You might be wondering why I’m even talking about carbon emissions and footprints – we are, after all, a food blog, but with the Eat Well Guided Tour of America coming up, we here at Sustainable Table have all been thinking about the impact the tour will have on the planet, and how that balances out with the message we’re bringing people. In other words, will our message of buying local (which saves thousands of miles of food transport, thus saving oil and creating less pollution) do more to reduce carbon emissions than if we just stayed in the office and wrote about it on the blog?

We’re thinking this might be a topic we carry throughout the tour so we can hear what other people have to say about carbon footprints and pollution and our impact on the planet, so if any of you have any thoughts on the matter, please feel free to join in the conversation.

When we started arranging the tour, I said I wanted to do something to offset our impact on the planet but that I didn’t want to do energy credits. I don’t understand them, and to tell you the truth, I don’t trust them and don’t think they do anything except make people feel less guilty for polluting. But because it was just my gut speaking, I had my assistant look into credits and what we found basically confirmed what I’d thought. Assuming 9,000 miles driving and 17,000 miles in the air, do you want to guess how much that costs to offset if you use credits? Seriously, take a guess.

Under $150! Can you believe that? I think it came out to around $135 – for 40 days of carbon emitting and energy use. That just confirmed my belief that energy credits are not a good way to offset your carbon footprint.

We’re still looking into our options – I want to buy Earthboxes – they’re basically boxes of soil that you can plant food in. They can be used anywhere and are really efficient because of the way they’re built so you don’t need much water and the soil is really fertile and grows a lot in a little space. I want to donate them to groups or schools who don’t have the space for a proper garden and don’t have easy access to fresh vegetables. Or maybe solar panels for a school or community center. Or providing seed money for some school gardens.

We might not be able to calculate exactly how we’re offsetting our footprint, but if we provide local food for people who need and want it, we won’t just be saving food miles for this year – we could be offsetting forever. Each person that learns about eating local through any program we help out with will save around 1500 miles of food transport each time they go out and buy local food. And if that person then tells other people about eating local, that many more miles will be saved. So we think this could go much further than buying an energy credit.

What do you think? We’ll be having a discussion about this in our forum and will bring this subject up again on the blog, so feel free to let us know what you think would be a good option.

And wherever you are, I hope your day is as sunny and beautiful as mine!