Does it make environmental sense for supermarkets to truck our food via a centralised 'hub'?

I saw the news story in the Guardian on Saturday about the Cornish clotted cream which travels 340 miles just to be stacked on a shelf in a supermarket two miles from the dairy where it was produced.

At first, I thought this sounded bonkers, but the more I thought about it the less I was convinced this was as silly as it might first appear.

Yes, it would make better sense for that individual store to take delivery of the clotted cream direct from the dairy rather than see it go on a roundtrip to the supermarket's distribution centre at Bristol, but if you applied this logic to every item in a supermarket you would quickly lose the economies of scale gained when operating a centralised system. Are the supermarkets taking a unfair rap on this particular issue?

M Hartfield, by email

Food miles are a far more complicated, nuanced issue than is often portrayed, as we've discussed many times before on this site. Examples can be found to support both sides of the debate.

However, the specific issue of how supermarkets move food around the country (as opposed to, say, the air-freighting of food) is one angle of the debate that riles many people, particularly when case studies such as these tubs of clotted cream are presented. Should our motorways be busy with trucks taking food up and down the country via centralised distribution hubs? Couldn't a more intelligent system be devised which allowed local products to remain within their region for consumption and avoid these "needless" journeys?

Many supermarkets now boast that they stock local produce, but it often transpires that it, too, can get sent hundreds of miles away to be packaged and then distributed. In this situation, should this produce even be marketed as "local"?

Coincidentally, a recent article in the New York Times by Stephen Budiansky (and a subsequent blog) criticising the "locavore" movement has attracted a lot of attention online. He has made some reasoned - if not necessarily original - observations about why slavishly following the "local food" mantra is not always a good thing. Some of his arguments might act as fuel to the debate here.

And in a slight tweak to the regular Ask Leo format, instead of returning on Friday to round up and respond to the comments left here, I am now going to monitor and react to the comments as they are posted over the first couple of days. I feel the crowd-sourcing element to these discussions has been really constructive and I'm keen to promote it as much as possible. A "live", conversational thread should, I hope, help us to penetrate and analyse these topics in even greater depth. Definitive answers to many of the topics we discuss here are elusive and a highly collaborative approach seems to make sense. I hope you agree.

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With Twinings moving production of its tea from North Shields to Poland, what would Rudyard Kipling's imperial pioneers think?

Tea's addictively bitter aftertaste is one of many aspects of the British national drink which are given the credit for one of history's great cultural hijackings. Understandable soreness at the Twinings tea factory in North Shields, which closes in September next year, is a reminder of how possessive we are about the cup that cheers.

The closure is a tragedy but local unions say that staff – 263 are retiring or looking for work elsewhere – have resigned themselves to last November's news that production will be transferred to Poland to save money. The firm has given long notice, training support, other jobs within the group and enhanced redundancy. Britain has benefited many times from similar closures overseas and transfers here.

The bitterness, however, has come from the current scheme for Polish workers to visit the Tyne and learn its tea lore from the staff they are replacing. Not unusual, again; most of us will one day have to help someone to fill our shoes. But tea produced in Poland? No, no. That is against the laws of God and man.

In a sense it is. One of the buttresses of conviction that tea is our sacred drink is the fact that it so evidently is not the continental Europeans'. Generations of UK holidaymakers have been appalled at watery rubbish in the lands where coffee rules. The United States is every bit as bad. They crown the offence by a fetish with teabags of gaudy colour and maximum complication (which, alarmingly, through globalisation, are making some headway here).

Yet "British" tea is a sleight of hand, at its cheekiest in the marketing of Yorkshire Tea by Taylor's of Harrogate, whose adverts in distant places such as the London Underground subliminally suggest that the hills of the north are green with plantations of Camellia sinensis. When challenged, the reasoning goes that the blend is especially suited to Yorkshire water; but there are many variants of the latter, all deliciously different, and only a handful of bottled versions are available anywhere near the London Underground.

We do have a case, though, against complaints of brand-theft by the world's original tea drinkers, who start beyond what you might call the Milk and Sugar Curtain, a border which follows the line of the old Iron Curtain and then loops round the Arab world, with its venerable and many-flavoured infusions. Their ceremonies are even more courtly than ours, and have the same mystique about pot-warming, pouring sequence and to-strain-or-not-to-strain – but Britons have laid down many more lives for the drink.

"Follow on!" say the ghosts of Rudyard Kipling's imperial pioneers in Song of the Dead, "For we are waiting, by the trails that we lost." Many of those trails led to survey sites for the planting of tea, or investments which failed in factories for sorting and grading its leaves. Sri Lanka rightly claims some of the best tea in the world, especially high-grown; but its industry acknowledges that it was a Briton – actually a Scotsman, but that is not far from Tyneside – who saved the day when coffee rust wiped out the island's previous staple crop in the 1860s. James Taylor's initial 19 acres at Loolecondera met the demands of Kipling's ghosts, and prompted another grand old imperial saying when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle declaimed in 1892: "Not often is that men have the heart, when their one great industry is withered, to rear up another as rich to take its place. The tea fields of Ceylon [as Sri Lanka was then known in the UK] are as true a monument to courage as is the lion at Waterloo."

It is much easier to say than to do, but that is the way forward for Tyneside. And who knows, it may be helped by the goodwill which comes from helping the Poles to deal with tea. In the same story, De Profundis, Conan Doyle refers to the paradox that this island's history is cosmopolitan, while so much of the European continent's has been insular. That has been another recipe, like tea, for success.

Don't let the tube strike defeat you. Our tips on on how to cycle past the the queues

If you are a London commuter dreading tube strike chaos this evening and tomorrow there is an alternative to fighting your way on to overcrowded buses or a long walk.

Whether you are a lapsed cyclist nervous about busy roads, or don't even have a bike, here's our practical guide to cycling to work:

• I don't have a bike. If you're really keen, this could be the perfect excuse to fork out for a two-wheeled steed. London Cycling Campaign has lots of advice on what to look for in a new bike plus the accessories like lights and a lock that are pretty essential. Alternatively, you could try hiring a bike for a couple of days, or sign up for the new central London cycle hire scheme. It costs just a pound to access the scheme for a day with usage charges varying depending on how long you use the bike for (up to 30 minutes is free). That won't get you into work from the suburbs, but if you are commuting into a central terminus like Liverpool Street or Charing Cross then a hire bike would take you the rest of the way.

• I haven't used my bike for a while. If your bike has been rusting at the back of the garage for a few months (or even years), you may not be confident it is actually safe to ride. LCC has a step by step guide to simple safety checks. If all is not well, they also have advice on how to fix some of the basic problems.

• Isn't it dangerous? London cycling certainly demands that you have your wits about you, but it is not the suicidal activity that some people think. There are now more than half a million cycle journeys in the capital every day - nearly double the figure in 2000. And cyclists experience roughly the same fatality risk per kilometre travelled as pedestrians.

For nervous cyclists who prefer strength in numbers, TFL is organising escorted rides from the following locations at 8am on the morning of 7th September:

• Ravenscourt park to Trafalgar Square; meeting point main entrance on Kings road
• Finsbury Park to St Paul's; meeting point entrance to Finsbury Park on Seven Sisters Road
• Mile End to St Paul's (utilising Barclays Cycle Superhighway route 3); meeting point corner of Mile End Road and Burdett Road at entrance to the park
• Swiss Cottage to Moorgate; meeting point junction of Eton avenue and Adamson Road
• Brixton to the West End (utilising the Barclays Cycle Superhighway route 7); meeting point the Ritzy cinema
• Clapham Common to the City (utilising the Barclays Cycle Superhighway route 7); meeting point the bandstand on the common

• How do I avoid main roads? Transport for London has a handy "Journey planner" in the top right hand corner of its homepage for cyclists. It is designed to help you stick to safer roads. TFL also has a set of cycle maps which can be picked up at bike shops or ordered online. The londoncyclist blog has a great round up of online route-finding tools. And the much criticised Barclays superhighways are an option if you happen to have one near you.

If you have any tips for beating the strike with your bike please share them below.

Hollywood's apparent sympathy for single women keen to have a baby turns out to be wholly fraudulent

You can wait for ages for a film to tackle some hot new social issue; then three come along at once. Moralists have been fretting for years about man-free procreation by the Sadfabs ("single and desperate for a baby"). At last, the big screen gave us Baby Mama, in which a fertility-challenged career girl opts for surrogacy. In May, donor sperm begat twins for The Back-Up Plan's broody loner. And now we are confronted by The Switch.

Perhaps you imagine that a woman's right to make her own reproductive choices has ceased to be controversial. If so, take a look at the Mail's reader comments. No surprise there, you may feel, but the doubts of some Guardian readers are perhaps more unexpected. Unattached babyclock-watchers determined to go it alone had better watch out: they can still expect raised eyebrows, or perhaps worse. When The Switch's star, Jennifer Aniston, dared stick up for her character's behaviour, veteran Fox News anchorman Bill O'Reilly denounced her as "destructive to our society".

In view of such thinking and the movies' hitherto implacable support for traditional family values, Hollywood's new-found willingness to embrace this topic looks at first sight quite courageous. Like Aniston, the stars of the two previous films, Tina Fey and Jennifer Lopez, are well-loved figures. (Shut up, Aniston loathers). The characters they play are treated with what looks like glutinous sympathy. But is all just as it seems?

This isn't an idle question. There's no doubt that a Sadfab baby-boom is actually under way. In the last decade, IVF treatments for single women more than doubled over a five-year period, in what's been dubbed an outbreak of "bio-panic". Steps are being taken to make it easier for single women to conceive artificially, but even some of their sisters disapprove. Lopez took a very different view from Aniston of Sadfab impregnation procedures. She told Elle magazine that she'd contemplated IVF, but because she believed in God, "I just felt like you don't mess with things like that".

Nonetheless, a recent survey's shown that as many as 83% of American women of child-bearing age back Aniston rather than Lopez. Studies have shown that assisted reproduction has no obviously negative impact on child development, and that the children of go-it-alone mothers needn't be disadvantaged. Supportive movies might do something to help the Sadfabs' disfavoured cause. However, such support as has seemed to be forthcoming turns out to be illusory.

In Baby Mama [spoiler alert], Fey's character's independent approach to motherhood is quickly punished. Her plan goes hilariously wrong, and she's required to find herself a proper fiancé, with whom she goes on to raise a conventionally sired sprog. In The Back-Up Plan, Lopez's character's independence is equally short-lived. She's allowed to get herself pregnant, but then she too is allocated a fiancé. The lonely road awaiting real-life Sadfab mums is never even countenanced, let alone cinematically endorsed.

In The Switch, things get even worse. Once again, the unorthodox progenitress is shown the error of her ways by seeing her godless gameplan go haywire. This time however, she also has to put up with being cheated out of her semen of choice by an embittered usurper. Her ill-gotten infant is neurotic, doubtless because he's had no father-figure to sort him out. Finally, to gain access to the empyrean of coupledom, Aniston's character's required to bestow upon her violator both her heart and her hand.

What looks as if it might prove an affectionate treatment of female empowerment turns into a ferocious assertion of romantic, familial and genetic traditional correctness. Then, on top of all this, the film-makers have also managed to deliver a real-world insult to the Sadfab cherub-chasers.

The Switch was originally to be called The Baster. Aniston, who's perhaps the Sadfabs' global doyenne, wanted this title kept; studio bosses didn't. Presumably they feared filmgoers might be repelled by such a naked reference to the disgusting practices of singleton baby-makers.

If you're a single woman eager to become a mother, you have secured the movies' attention. Don't imagine, however, that you've also won their blessing.