(Photo courtesy of Nagy Gábor @ flickr. Used under a Creative Commons lisence.)
Early in the morning of March 27, 2006, Daniel Breton stopped at a rest area in Allamuchy, New Jersey to sleep. Breton, a physicist by training who was working as a truck driver between jobs, had started his assignment six days earlier in Chico, California. There, he had picked up his store: 80,000 pounds of Sierra Nevada destined for Brooklyn.
A rough estimate on Google Maps shows that the line connecting the two points could hardly stretch further. At more than 2,800 miles, the trip is longer than the 2,680-mile width of the USA. Longer still than the 2,092 miles between the two shortest coastal points.
Following a Rand MacNally atlas, and a primitive GPS unit, Breton left his rest stop in New Jersey at 3 a.m. After getting lost, he found his way back onto the highway. A dense fog and the night sky restricted his visibility to less than a hundred feet. Shortly before his exit, Breton describes how a bridge emerged out the mist. At sixty miles an hour, it came at him quickly. The green clearance sign on bridge said 12' 6". His truck stood 13' 6". In his words, Breton let out a scream before his truck suddenly passed under the bridge.
How Daniel's truck didn't collide with a bridge it was a full foot taller than is a mystery. Having weighed his truck down with 40 tonnes of beer, it's possible that it would have compressed the shocks enough to allow it pass.
What Breton was able to measure, however, is how many times he refueled over the nearly 3,000 miles that separate Chico from Brooklyn.
According to his log, Breton stopped in such places as Fernley, NV, Salt Lake City, UT, Altoona, IA and Minooka, IL. He was driving a fairly new Volvo truck that got, he estimates, around 6 mile per gallon. That means that over the course of his trip, he estimates that he used almost 500 gallons of diesel fuel. Or, somewhere between the average house electrical consumption in one year and the average house heat consumption in one year.
For some, impossibly passing under a bridge would be a lesson in higher intervention. For Breton, it was a lesson in the need to drink beer brewed locally.
"Fundamentally, you're transporting water," Breton says. "There's some other stuff in beer, but it's basically water. Which I guess rain clouds do for free."
Editorial Note: I recently published an article about the search for a sustainable beer here in the pages of On Earth. The number one piece of advice was: drink local brew. Or, to borrow a line from Michael Pollan: Drink beer. Not too much. Mostly local.
You can read "In Search of a Homegrown Beer" here.
That gives a whole new meaning to the 'please drink responsibly' label that appears on most alcoholic beverages.
I think that the idea of consuming as few resources as possible in making the goods we use from day to day is - clearly - a sensible idea, but concentrating on food miles alone won't neccessarily provide useful answers. Just from an environmental perspective it may be less energy-intensive to grow barley in warmer climates than in colder ones, so even accounting for the energy consumed in transportation it might be more energy-efficient overall to grow and brew where it's warm, and transport to other areas for consumption. Additionally, there are wider social and economic effects that deserve careful attention when you start to discuss effectively putting barriers to trade in place for what are very worthy environmental reasons.
All that isn't to say that it's not legitimate to question whether our food really does need to be better-travelled than we are, and it's reassuring to know that there are trained physicists driving trucks in the US doing just that.