In the United States, the items on a typical dinner plate have traveled between 1,500 and 2,500 miles to get there. That distance has increased by as much as 25 percent over the last 20 years — an increase that comes with a series of consequences for food, farmers, consumers, local economies and even the global climate.Starting last fall on Tufts’’ Medford/ Somerville campus, students had the chance to lower the overall mileage(里程)of their lunches when the dining hall offered apples grown in nearby Topsfield, Mass. Part of the Harvest Food Festival, the "make-your-own-caramel (饴糖) -apple" display featured (特出展示) six different locally grown apple varieties. The popular TuftsDining Services program was part of ongoing efforts to increase the amount of local produce (农产品) available on Tufts’’ campuses.Friedman School Ph.D、student MelissaBailey is one of those devoted to the cause.Combining her interests in sustainable agriculture and public policy,Bailey took it upon herself to breathe new life into the Tufts FoodAwareness Project, a group launched by Tufts graduate students in the 1990s to raise awareness about the environmental, social and health issues connected to food production."It was a great start, and there had been a lot of student backing and interest,"Bailey says. "But when the students graduate, the idea sort of graduates with them if it’’s not institutionalized as part of the community."SoBailey joined forces with Julie Lampie, nutrition marketing specialist forDining Services, in whom she found an enthusiastic ally, and secured a grant from the Tufts Institute for theEnvironment to pay graduate studentsBryanna Millis and Georgia Kayser to work on the project. Together, the team works to raise awareness, solve problems and forge partnerships among the primary players: Tufts’’ chefs, major food distributors and local farmers. Bailey and Lampie — who work on the project mainly as a labor of love — also seek to raise awareness among the student body to the point where student demand drives the addition of local produce to Tufts’’ menus. On caramel apple night, their outreach (达到的范围) took the form of informational posters about theConnemara HouseApple Farm and Guinee family who plant and tend the apple trees. They also described the personal and global benefits of eating locally grown produce."Of course the students loved making caramel apples, but it also gave them an education,"Bailey says. "It’’s not up to me to make an ethical appeal to them, but they need to have the information to be able to make an informed choice."From farm to forkWhat are the benefits of buying local Obviously, produce making the trip from Topsfield to Medford requires less sossil (化石) fuel to get it from farm to dining hall than apples grown in Washington State. Using less gasoline means reducing the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. Shorter trips also require less energy-consuming refrigeration and waste-producing packaging. Some experts estimate that globe-travelling produce can require up to four times as much energy as an equivalent amount of local food and account for four times the greenhouse gas emissions (释放) . Then there’’s the amount of energy, water, pesticides and fertilizers that go into raising produce. "If you grow things that are suited to your climate locally,"Bailey explains, "you might not need as many of these inputs on the front end to grow things."Since the terrorist attacks of September 11,2001, homeland security experts have even noted that food is more vulnerable to sabotage (破坏) the longer the distance from farm to fork. Recent decades have witnessed the rise of centralized, corporate agriculture; just 10 multinational companies produce more than half of the products available in the average supermarket. That puts the nation’’s food supply at greater risk for contamination (污染) — whether intentional or unintentional, as with mad cow diseas