How far has your food traveled?

A student forwarded this CNN report from Monday:

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Next time you are out for dinner on a business trip, you may find that the food on your plate has traveled further than you have.

Choosing between the locally farmed chicken or the New Zealand venison from the menu can help the environment.

Food miles -- the distance food is transported from the plough to the plate -- is of increasing concern for environmentalists.

This comes as we travel more and our tastes go global, whether it be for Chinese pine nuts or snap peas from Kenya.

However, hauling Peruvian asparagus or Pakistani mangoes across continents and oceans is not only costly financially, but is a growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

"When you are bringing food from so far away it can be as much as four times or ten times as much as if you were buying that product locally," says Kezia Cowtan from LifeCycles Project [link added -- ed.] a non-profit group focused on food sustainability.