Food miles statistics

Most food miles statistics you will see trace back to two sources: a 2001 Iowa report about produce trucked into Chicago and the 2008 national estimate above. Our earlier post on local artisans and farmers covers food miles as an idea. Here is where the numbers come from.

The "1,500 miles" line comes from Food, Fuel, and Freeways, a June 2001 report by Rich Pirog and colleagues at Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Using USDA arrival data, they found that fresh produce arriving by truck at the Chicago terminal market in 1998 had traveled an average of 1,518 miles, 22 percent more than the 1,245 miles recorded in 1981.

The 2008 study took a wider view. Its 1,640 km covers the delivery of finished food from producer to retail across the US diet. The 6,760 km adds the miles traveled upstream through the rest of the supply chain. Both are modeled averages published in 2008, so no single item on your table will match them.

Imports have grown since then. In a January 2025 Chart of Note, USDA's Economic Research Service reported that imports supplied 59 percent of the fresh fruit available to US consumers in 2023, up from 50 percent in 2007. For fresh vegetables (not counting potatoes, sweet potatoes and mushrooms), the import share rose from 20 to 35 percent. Mexico supplied 51 percent of fresh fruit import value and 69 percent of fresh vegetable import value in 2023, Canada 2 and 20 percent.

How far does food travel? The section above answers that in miles. For the climate, the better question is what share of the carbon footprint of food comes from moving it, one link in a long food supply chain. Three widely cited studies give three different answers, and the reasons they differ are useful.

Li and colleagues modeled food trade across 74 world regions and 37 economic sectors and estimated food-miles emissions at about 3.0 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year, 3.5 to 7.5 times higher than earlier estimates. That came to about 19 percent of total food system emissions in their accounting of transport, production and land-use change. Moving fruit and vegetables made up 36 percent of food-miles emissions, almost twice what growing them released.

Carbon Brief's coverage adds detail. High-income countries, with about 12.5 percent of the world's population, accounted for 52 percent of international food miles and 46 percent of the emissions tied to them. International trips made up 71 percent of food miles, yet domestic transport produced 1.3 times more emissions. Some 94 percent of domestic food transport goes by road, while 93 percent of international food freight goes by ship. Ending all international food transport would cut food-miles emissions by only 9 percent. Ulrich Kreidenweis, a researcher quoted in that piece, said he would interpret the results with caution, since some of the authors' choices, such as the mass of food transported and the emissions from some transport modes, may lead to a strong overestimation.

A widely used farm-level dataset comes from Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek, published in Science in 2018 and covering more than 38,000 farms in 119 countries. Our World in Data's summary of that work puts food at about 26 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Transport accounts for 6 percent of food system emissions, and food that is lost or wasted for about a quarter.

A 2020 Our World in Data analysis by Hannah Ritchie uses the same dataset food by food. Land use and farm-stage emissions make up more than 80 percent of the footprint for most foods. Transport is under 10 percent for most foods, and about 0.5 percent for beef from beef herds. The same analysis notes that lettuce imported from Spain to the UK in winter can carry 3 to 8 times lower emissions than lettuce grown in the UK at that time of year.

Weber and Matthews reached the same conclusion for US diets. Red meat was about 150 percent more greenhouse gas intensive than chicken or fish, and they calculated that shifting less than one day a week of calories from red meat and dairy to chicken, fish, eggs or a vegetable-based diet would cut more emissions than buying all food from local providers.

A 2010 USDA Economic Research Service report on local food systems reviewed the transportation emissions research and found that studies disagree on whether local food uses less energy. Large loads in the mainstream system can offset the shorter distance of small local deliveries, and the studies it reviewed found few significant differences other than for air-freighted products. It also notes that production, processing and household storage and preparation each take a larger share of US food system energy than transport.

Wikipedia's summary of transport distance research traces the term food miles to the UK in the early 1990s, and the measure has been argued over ever since. Food transport emissions are real and worth trimming. They sit inside much larger food system emissions from land use, farming and waste.

A local grocery market can shorten the last leg of the trip and make it easier to ask where food came from. The research suggests that the local food environmental impact depends more on what is on the shelf and how it was grown than on the miles alone.

That last point comes from the same ERS report: there is no generally accepted definition of local food. The 2008 Farm Act counted a product as locally or regionally produced if it traveled less than 400 miles or stayed within its state, and stores and programs often set their own lines.

Ordering pantry goods by parcel from a maker several states away is not a low food-miles choice in itself, and it would be wrong to sell it as one. What it does give you is a name and a place. On LocalCart, each maker ships its own products, so items from two makers arrive as two shipments with two shipping charges at checkout. Grouping a few items from one maker keeps it to a single box.

Some makers say where their ingredients come from. The Pasta Lab bag in the product photo reads "Pasta made with local grains & ingredients from the Mid-Atlantic region. Produced in Philadelphia, PA." Rosie's Kettle Corn in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, says its popcorn is sourced locally in Lancaster County. Loudounberry Farm & Garden in Virginia lists blackberries, blueberries and black raspberries on its Black Bear Jam, without saying where the fruit was grown, which is the kind of question worth asking.