Fresh fruit and food miles.... Greenies, what do you give your kids in winter?

[2nervesleft]

My kids love apples but also grapes, strawberries, bananas and blueberries. I'm trying to be conscious of food miles so what ideas for fruit that hasn't flown half way around the world do you have?

bump.

I think a limited range is fine.We stick to apples and pears and oranges and banansa but i do bu the occasionalpunnet of raspberries as dd loves them so.

Are bananas acceptable then? I bought some organic from M&S but they came from Costa Rica.

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Oh I didn't know that. What about grapes? I don't think we could avoid buying those but if you know how they could be "greener" I would be grateful. Or is there a website with theis sort of info on it?

I have this conundrum myself. I try and stick to apples, pears and bananas but DD's all time favourite food is raspberries so I do give in and buy them occassionally.

As for veg, now that purple sprouting, curly kale and spring greens are back on the menu it is very much easier. We eat tons of frozen peas too but I have no idea about food miles on them.

Oh yes we eat a lot of frozen peas too. Hadn't thought about them, can't see us giving them up though. If they are frozen then they would travel by boat surely?

Please Greenies - I know there are a lot of you out there. Advise me on how to keep a clear (ish) conscience.

still using our own apples here, stored wrapped in newspaper in the cellar. they don;t look good, but are fab cooked. Can't get lower food miles than that really.
Boy has gone right off banana lately.
We buy a locally sourced veg bag each week through the surestart centre.If we got them we could use the heathy start vouchers to pay for it.

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Well we do a lot of apples and pears, including stewing them for a bit of variety. And then you can add raisins and cinnamon or a tin of blackberries for a bit of variety. Because I am quite bored of them TBH. DD and I love raspberries so once a week I defrost some that we PYOed last summer. Brilliant. Oh and we have satsumas atm. Also I am finding pears not very good but I suppose that serves me right for buying them from Asda.

Oh snorkle how can you prefer anything to peas fresh from the pod? If I grew peas I don't think any of them would ever make it into the kitchen. A bit like the strawberries which are mostly eaten straight from the plant.

We are eating the last of the frozen berries, etc from the allotment so no food miles here. I will buy from as far as europe if the kids ask for a particular fruit and the bananas travel by boat which is slightly more acceptable. Veg-wise we are eating remains of the garden harvest as well.
GYO honestly it's truly worth it!

If you really long for raspberries, I think it's better to buy frozen ones - more likely to come from Europe, and if they don't, then they'll have travelled by sea.
I guess one of the things I love about soft fruit is the fact that it's so transient - just a few gluttonous summer weeks and then it's all gone for another year.
Grapes, I think, are impossible to have 'green-ly' in the winter - they don't last long enough for lower-carbon transport. Raisins?!
I read something somewhere before Christmas about the carbon footprint of a single punnet of blueberries flown from New Zealand (apparently less unusual than it should be): equivalent to something like a week's worth of a 5 mile each way school run in a 4x4. For one punnet! Again - how about frozen?

Mine are mostly having apples (local), pears (local) bananas (fairtrade but obviously not local) and satsumas (as local as we can manage, usually Spain).

and they have a lot of dried fruit which must have arrived from a distance but hopefully by boat, slowly.

luckily they don't get bored of the same fruit day after day.

UniSarah - we stored our own eating and cooking apples in our storeroom only mr and mrs mouse and family moved in and eat the lot right from under our nose!

Our policy is that if something grows in this country we don't buy it from abroad out of season. So no strawberries or green beans in January etc.

If it doesn't grow here at all, e.g. bananas, we buy only fruit that is transported by ship and preferably fair trade and organic too.

We also freeze lots of soft fruits from our garden and allotment to see us through the 'leaner' times.

Growing my own is not an option unfortunately, I can't keep on top of my little shrub garden let alone anything else. My dad has an allotment (sadly not organic - he's a bit old school and loves his slug pellets) so we are never short of veg all year. We get lots of black and red currents in the summer as well as raspberries but nowt in winter. M&S always have lovely fruit options in the winter but when I look at how far it has come. I have to stop going there because a little voice in my head says
"Strawberries all the way from Egypt, outrageous, but they are here now so I might as well buy them.."

Does anyone have any good website recommendations to help reduce food miles?

Most of our fruit and veg comes from Abel and Cole, and their stuff is never air freighted. That being said, we end up with bananas, mangoes, oranges, and all sorts. If I'm shopping in the supermarket, I try to stick to things from Europe.

Apparently M+S is going to start indicating which fruit and veg are air-freighted soon?

2Nerves could you freeze some of the raspberries in the summer?