“It’s harvest time somewhere” is the sustainable foodie’s version of “it’s five o’ clock somewhere.”

You might think that eating tropical fruit in the middle of winter is surely less sustainable than eating food produced in your own community. Think again. If you’re choosing between an apple from your own backyard and an apple flown across the continent, the food miles are the difference. But what about when you want to eat something that you can’t grow, or when nothing is growing in your backyard?

It turns out that what you eat is far more important than where it is produced, especially if you want to eat a sustainable diet all year. For the parts of the United States and Canada experiencing winter weather, eating locally grown food in February means frozen or fermented vegetables, fruit preserves, and perhaps fresh kale from a greenhouse. You’re more likely to have a variety of meat, fowl, fish, dairy and eggs available from local producers than fresh fruits and vegetables. Just a few generations ago, living at these latitudes meant fearing that your family might run out of food at this time of year.

You’d do everything you could to add meat and dairy to the stored apples (and apple cider), potatoes, and root vegetables that would get you through until spring.

But today if you walk into supermarkets across North America, you’re very likely to find fresh bananas, no matter the season. With 84% of households buying them, they are the most popular fruit sold in the United States. Yet no banana is locally grown for anyone in this country outside of Hawaii. Bananas stop growing at temperatures below 50 degrees Fahrenheit and die if temperatures dip below 28 degrees. Rather than growing them, we import them from Guatemala, Ecuador, Costa Rica and other warm countries that can produce bananas all year long.

In your local grocery store, if you keep walking from the produce to the meat section, you’re also likely to find beef, produced right here in the United States. In fact, beef cattle are raised in all 50 states of the Union. Chances are that the bananas in the store have traveled thousands of miles more than the steaks. Which one, per ounce, has a higher carbon footprint: the imported bananas or the domestic beef?

Our World in Data, a collaboration between the University of Oxford and the Global Change Data Lab, published a deep dive into the greenhouse gas emissions across the supply chain for a variety of food products, including beef and bananas. They found that per ounce, beef has a carbon footprint 85 times higher than bananas. Transportation is a tiny fraction of the environmental impact of beef–as it is for every kind of meat. Beef has an outsized carbon footprint because lots of land is required to grow the grass (often corn, which, botanically speaking, is a grass) that cattle eat.

Growing plants, feeding the plants to animals, and eating the animals, is an incredibly wasteful way to convert sunlight, water, and nutrients into food that people can eat. It’s far less work to grow and eat tasty plants. It turns out that bananas, even if we put them on trucks and ships and send them thousands of miles to market, create less pollution to provide more nutrition. We can be a little more sustainable by boosting our banana intake and cutting back on beef.

Before we had transportation and food storage infrastructure, it made sense to eat beef. A family farm could either grow far more fruits and vegetables than they could eat in a year, or convert inedible grass into meat that was practical to preserve. Productivity per acre was less important than producing food that was easy to eat locally, especially throughout the winter.

But today’s technology flips that logic. Farm productivity matters more. As we electrify trucks and clean up our electricity grids, transportation will have fewer negative environmental impacts. With the ability to transport food around the world efficiently and reliably from warm climates to cold, getting more food per acre of land is more sustainable. If we continue to improve the sustainability of our transportation and energy systems, our sustainable food choices will continue to grow in every season.

Fred Horch is principal adviser for Sustainable Practice. To receive expert action guides to help your household and organizations become superbly sustainable, visit SustainablePractice.Life and subscribe to “One Step This Week.”

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