During one of our inputs Richard introduced us all to the world of food. Don’t worry there was an element of maths to it. I mean of course it wasn’t just all about snacking on delicious snacks and playing games. Or was it?

We discussed the idea of mathematics being present in the food industry the idea of logistics and supply chains. Richard asked us to think about the food that we eat, grow and how it gets to us. The more we looked into the topic, the more we discovered that the food we consume each day has a considerable amount of mathematical thought put behind it, in order to reach us. It is something that is an important process, however, I have hardly ever given it much thought. I just always expect the food to get to the supermarket so I can then have it. Everything that you touch and use has come from a supply chain.

Many things need to be taken into consideration such as:

• the shape and the weight (length, height, depth, bulk)
• the packaging
• the temperature
• travel and out of date (Shelf life)

An example of a product which has been manipulated in order to transport easier is a watermelon.  As watermelons are round they cause gaps to be produced when packing. This limits the amount of watermelons which could be packed into one container. This then loses the distributors quite a bit of money. So Japan decided to come up with a new idea. An innovative idea. They came up with these,

They decided to farm and produce squared shape watermelons, to try and pack more easily into containers! The Japanese used their mathematical knowledge and applied it to food distribution and industry. As you can imagine this idea did not catch on, as I assume no one has saw one in their local supermarket yet?

We then discussed food miles. This is the amount of energy and CO2 emissions used in order to transport our food from different countries around the world. We were given the example of Lamb (something which I am no expert on as I do not eat it), and whether we thought that it would be more cost effective to purchase it from New Zealand or the United Kingdom.

Most shop owners and supermarket chains will have to work out where they will get the best deal from. We discovered that New Zealand would be best as they use lower levels of energy and lower emissions in the transport of lamb, than here in the UK. I bet you did not expect that!

Image found at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1390088.stm