The ingredients of a single supermarket meal in the UK may easily have travelled 24,000 miles, the Euro-toques National Food Forum in Wicklow heard yesterday.
Stressing the environmental necessity to use locally-produced food, Mr Robert Cook, of the International Society for Ecology and Culture, told the international chefs' organisation that chefs were in a unique position to promote local foods by advertising and promoting their use.
"UK figures estimate that the distance food is transported by road increased by 50 per cent between 1978 and 1999, and the food system now accounts for between a third and 40 per cent of all UK road freight.
"The ingredients of a single supermarket meal may easily have travelled a total of over 24,000 miles.
"In the light of international governmental recognition that immediate action is necessary if we are to avoid creating catastrophic changes to our climate, then to continue transporting from the other side of the world foodstuffs that we can happily produce ourselves is clearly a dangerous nonsense," Mr Cook told the conference, which was chaired by Mr John Hume, the former SDLP leader.
"Long distance food requires more packaging, which must be created and disposed of. It also requires the use of preservatives, and preservation techniques such as refrigeration, fungicides and fumigants, which all have their own pollution problems. Other gases from transportation systems contribute to local pollution, to photochemical smogs in cities and to acid rain."
Mr Cook said that on top of the environmental costs, there were enormous social consequences in turning large areas of third world countries over to the production of cheap food for western diets rather than for providing locally-grown food for local people.
Mr Alan Dukes, director general of the Institute of European Affairs, said the recent reform of the Common Agricultural Policy would mean the end of subsidy-driven agriculture and farmers could now concentrate on producing quality produce.
Mr Ross Lewis, commissioner-general of Euro-toques Ireland, said chefs were seeing increasing demand from consumers for locally-produced foods.
"The number of farmers' markets around the country has increased rapidly, and here in Ireland we are seeing a great resurgence in small scale, artisan food production..."
There are 200 members of the Euro-toques organisation in Ireland.