高考◆英语◆湖北省題庫下載題庫

D

An environmental group called the Food Commission is unhappy and disappointed because of the sale of bottled water from Japan. The water, it angrily argues an public, has traveled 10,000 "food miles" before it reaches Western customers. "Transporting water halfway across the world is

surely the extremely stupid use of fuel when there is plenty of water in the UK." It is also worried that we are wasting our fuel by buying prawns(对虾) from Indonesia (7,000 food miles) and carrots from Sooth Africa (5,900 food miles).

Counting the number of miles traveled by a product is a strange way of trying to tell the true situation of the environmental damage clone by an industry. Most food is transported around the world on container ships that are extremely energy-efficient (高能效的). It should be noted that a ton of butter transported 25 miles in a truck to a farmers' market does not necessarily use less fuel on its journey than a similar product transported hundreds of miles by sea. Besides, the idea of "food miles" ignores the amount of fuel used in the production. It is possible to cut down your food miles by buying tomatoes grown in Britain rather than those grown in Ghana; the difference is that the British ones will have been raised in heated greenhouses and the Ghanaian ones in the open sun.

What the idea of "food miles” does provide, however, is the chance to cut out Third World countries from First World food markets. The number of miles traveled by our food should, as I see it, be regarded as a sign of the success of the global (全球的) trade system, not a sign of damage to the environment.