A food mile is a measure of the distance food travels from producer to consumer, used as a shorthand for the environmental cost of transporting what we eat. Long food miles are criticised as wasteful of fuel, damaging to freshness and quality, and unfair to local producers who cannot compete with cheap imports. The concept fuelled the local-food movement and “local sourcing” policies in retail and catering. Analysts note, however, that distance alone is a crude indicator: how food is grown and transported matters more — air-freighted produce has a far bigger footprint than the same goods shipped by sea, and heated greenhouses can outweigh the cost of importing field-grown crops. Lifecycle assessment gives the fuller picture that food miles began.