When we first moved here, I asked the greengrocer in town whether any of his produce was grown locally. He told me that while a very small percentage of it was sourced from local growers, he bought most of it from the wholesale market in Melbourne.

He has to do it that way because small local producers can’t always reliably supply the amount of produce, demanded by the market, at a price that consumers want to pay.

This means that the produce is grown somewhere distant, transported to the city and a couple of times a week the greengrocer drives down to Melbourne in his truck and drives back with a load of produce.

By the time we buy it, the produce has travelled hundreds of kilometres. By the time we consume it, its nutritional value is probably next to zero.

The distance that food travels, before it reaches your plate, is known as food miles. They’re called food miles, rather than food kilometres, because the concept originated in England.

Food miles, however, are now seen as only part of the carbon emissions calculation. Add all the energy that’s used to produce the food and this equals the food’s carbon footprint.

A product’s carbon footprint takes into account the embodied carbon dioxide in the whole life of a product. When it comes to food production, this energy is seen as much more significant than food miles in contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Take the following, for example.

Despite the distance it travels to reach the tables of UK diners, New Zealand-reared lamb has a smaller carbon footprint than its UK-reared equivalent.

This is because the electricity used by UK sheep farmers is from non-renewable resources. New Zealand farmers, on the other hand, use renewable hydro-electricity for all their farm operations. The same rationale applies to the abattoirs where the lambs are slaughtered and to the energy used if animals need to be housed during winter.

It now seems that carbon footprinting is the new food miles.

Food producers in developing countries are no longer stigmatised by wealthier countries because of their distance from markets and resultant food miles in reaching it.

Farmers in poorer countries use less machinery and fewer fertilisers and are therefore more energy efficient than their counterparts in developed countries.

But even if a farmer is energy efficient, he still has the problem of transporting his products to market.

With air travel being one of the major greenhouse gas polluters, perhaps wind-powered ships could be the answer. Or maybe solar-powered hybrid trucks will be the new road transport.

It’s pleasing to think that our food will one day be brought to us by clean, alternative energy sources and modes of transport. Maybe it will be all the more palatable for it.