I love food. I love infographics. Put them together, and this is what you get. As part of the Eat Local, Eat Real campaign, this infographic video (below), produced by Sons and Daughters and Crush of Toronto, argues why we should eat local.
Director Gary Thomas explains:
We all found the statistics pretty eye opening. I think everyone involved changed the way we buy our food. Yoho’s wife had a baby girl in the middle of the project, and I grew a playoff beard which I’ve been reluctant to shave (just superstitious I guess). Challenges early on were the levels of legal approval the team at Unilever and Ogilvy had to go through on all the stats. Everyone wanted to make sure that the information was fair and irrefutable. All the food in the shoot was Canadian, which is no small challenge in spring. I don’t think I’ve ever been hugged by agency and their clients in twenty years in the business. That was definitely a high point.
While I still have a feeling that there might be a few holes in the data, as there tends to be with this sort of thing (I’m thinking Sprint’s Now campaign), the video itself is well-produced and certainly has me thinking about where my produce comes from.
[via infosthetics]
While I agree somewhat simply taking ‘food miles’ as a measure is flawed. New Zealand is the second most efficient country at producing lamb meat (we’ve just been overtaken by Argentina I believe). The real environmental cost of growing, processing and then shipping lamb meat from New Zealand to the UK is still better than producing the same product in the UK and trucking it to the markets there due to our farming methods being far more efficient.
They information they presented might be fair and irrefutable, but what about information they didn’t share? For example, how much food comes from the U.S.? Maybe it is small. But a huge percentage of Canadians (don’t remember the number, but it is high) live 100 miles or less from American borders. I would think of food coming from some places in the U.S. as “local”.
Very nicely crafted piece from the technical, content and presentation perspectives. It illustrates one of the many complex systems in our local and global economy, and how most of us are so unaware of the source of our daily bread, so to speak. Presuming that the figures are either accurate or close to actuality, it shows how quickly trends in one area (growth of imports) can impact or interact with others (local farm decline, transportation economics). What would happen to Canadian or US food prices and availability if there were a serious disruption in the global transportation network (e.g. fuel cost/availability)?
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There is of course the issue of pesticides when foods are grown in difficult climates. This is why I only prefer local that is organic. If I can support organic agriculture around the world, that is the thing to do, and maybe the US will have no excuse to dump corn if people can make profit of doing a good job growing healthy food.
From the conflicting and various locavore arguments, this seems extremely oversimplified.
The visual technique is brilliant. But the rapid-fire presentation discourages critical thought.