Word.ws English Dictionary

food miles

food miles noun: the number of miles a particular item of food travels from its source of production to its place of retail or consumption, used as a measure of the environmental impact in the global food trade.

Noun

food miles pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) The number of miles a particular item of food travels from its source of production to its place of retail or consumption, used as a measure of the environmental impact in the global food trade.
    • As a result of the rise in crude oil prices, the cost per food mile worldwide has soared.2008, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, International Energy Agency, World energy outlook 2008, →ISBN, page 174, →ISBN

Questions about food miles

What does food miles mean?
Food miles means the number of miles a particular item of food travels from its source of production to its place of retail or consumption, used as a measure of the environmental impact in the global food trade.
What part of speech is food miles?
Food miles is a noun.

Words near food miles in the dictionary

  1. food intolerance
  2. food intolerances
  3. food line
  4. food literacies
  5. food literacy
  6. food miles
  7. food mill
  8. food mills
  9. food mixer
  10. food mixers
  11. food noise

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: food miles (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “food miles.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/food_miles. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.