My problem with it is that not only are we paying the environmental cost to have berries all year round in the grocery store, it's that they're also just shit quality. Like not just passable, but are bitter and sour and not worth it at all. And it's sort of at the expense of really good, local berries when the real season hits. For example, I live in Brooklyn and the grocery stores last summer barely had any local blueberries from New Jersey. Everything was Driscolls branded berries, and they're always bad. They look like berries, but they taste awful, or at best like nothing, 95% of the time. I don't know much about the market, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had a year long contract and the local producers get shut out during the real season. Luckily there are farmers markets and CSAs near me.
People who live in Western cities have no fucking clue what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like.
It’s like a running gag that my father complains about supermarket tomatoes, but after travelling through rural places in Eastern and Southern Europe and a little bit in Central America, I totally get it.
Stuff is often in season in the US, and at that time, it's generally good in the supermarket. Then there's when it's not in season.
Contrast green beans shipped from 1500km away on a boat, arriving 2 weeks to a month later at the store, kept "fresh" by all sorts of waxy residue, and other "agents" sprayed on them with .... green beans canned within 2 hours of being picked.
Where I grew up, in a rural area, we had a local canning plant. They'd get farmers to plan to harvest on a schedule, and they'd literally be canning as the farmer drive trucks up with produce. No joke, they were canned within 2 hours, often faster, and that's how it's done these days.
Which has more vitamins? Which has more nutrition? I'd lay a bet that the canned stuff is far better, far better than something that has artificial stuff sprayed on it so it looks good (artifical 'wax', and various chemicals to keep it "fresh"), and spent weeks getting to the supermarket.
Oddly, I've seen people dump out the water in the can. What? That's where a lot of vitamins live!
Oh, same with my father. He would tell stories about going to the markets in Algeria when he was a kid and how it was totally normal to have fruit sellers cut into a melon right then and there to give you a sample. If it sucked you just wouldn't buy it, so there was always competition for having the best produce in the market. And this was him complaining to me about poor quality produce in the US when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s -- the quality has only gotten worse since then.
This should be corrected to fruit and vegetables taste better in regions where they are grown. Which is obvious, because picking them before they are ripe and transporting them thousands of kilometers for days or weeks is going to yield a less tasty fruit or vegetable. Also, plants bred for longevity of their fruit will obviously not be optimizing for taste.
Sure, maybe! Although I've generally found that the overall quality of ingredients tends to be better in the places I've traveled compared to the US. That's not to say I haven't picked up great figs at a bodega in the mission, or don't get good berries at the farmers markets near me in NYC. But if I walk into the produce aisle in most grocery stores in the US these days there is abundance, yet a lack of quality.
Personally, when it comes to fresh produce, I'd rather only be able to eat mostly what can be grown in season somewhat close to me (which would include greenhouses), rather than be able to get anything all year round and having it suck.
As a general rule, fruits and vegetables are much better quality on the US west coast because so much of it is produced locally. The difference in produce quality is quite noticeable. In the parts of Europe where I've spent a lot of time, the average vegetable quality and selection is noticeably worse than e.g. Seattle, but that mostly reflects the Pacific Northwest being a major high-quality producer of surprisingly diverse fruit and vegetables.
Tomatoes are probably about the worst example you could pick. Fresh tomatoes can be excellent (though I'm really not a tomato aficionado) during the short period when they're in season locally in much of the US. Outside that period, the recommendation for cooking tomatoes is generally to use canned because tomatoes are an example of something that doesn't ship well.
When I worked for an indoor-ag company whose big deal was picking varietals for flavor, rather than ability to travel across the country, I always pointed to how much tomatoes had changed in my lifetime as to why travel-ready produce was a problem.
Remember when toothbrush advertising demonstrated how the brush was so soft it wouldn't affect a tomato, let alone your gums? That demonstration makes no sense now.
That assumes you care enough about tomatoes to grow them. My local farmstand probably does a better job than I could when they’re in season which is true of most of what they sell.
>People who live in Western cities have no fucking clue what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like.
You really have to define what you mean by "supposed to taste like." As in "supposed to taste like what occurs in nature without human intervention" is very different than "supposed to taste like after humans have spent generations cultivating them to be the sweetest variety" which is different than "supposed to taste like when they are cultivated to optimize for logistics."
I suspect what you're referring to with the tomatoes is the last example, because they have been grown and picked to best withstand transit.
Of course Westerners know what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like. We can in fact grow them and do.
Where the problem lies is the changes made to fruits and vegetables to make them last the long journeys that they have to make from places that have longer growing seasons or cheaper labor.
Try a locally grown heirloom tomato in the summer in the American Midwest and you’ll get a phenomenal tasting fruit. More interestingly, try a bunch. It will be hard to say what a tomato is supposed to taste like because of the variety in flavors that come from location and breed.
By "Western cities" do you include the San Francisco Bay Area, when you shop at quality grocery stores? I keep hearing we are supposed to have some of the best food in the world.
> Look at the price tag on the blueberries. That is the cost.
We're absolute garbage at including externalities like pollution or long term effects into prices. Look at incredibly cheap plastic. It's a massive danger to everything yet a plastic bag costs cents.
People mention environmental costs. There are also geopolitical costs. I write this from Guatemala, where 70 years ago, a budding 10-year-old democracy was destroyed so that Americans could continue to get cheap bananas. And the country never really recovered.
Of course, from technology and "globalization", I think the abundance of American supermarkets would still have occurred, but this has been optimized at the expense of human rights and wages of people throughout the world.
> I write this from Guatemala, where 70 years ago, a budding 10-year-old democracy was destroyed so that Americans could continue to get cheap bananas. And the country never really recovered.
Worse, they mocked it and still do with terms such as "banana republic". They haven't even learned any better.
Why not? Bulk shipping is really efficient, local farmers markets can easily be worse for the environment than going to a supermarket. A Semi moving 35 tons at 7 MPG is 25 times more fuel efficient vs a ford F-150 moving 1/2 ton at 20 MPG and trains or boats are even better.
In the end fuel costs money so more efficient logistics is often good for the environment. Buying local makes a lot more sense if you live in a farming community than a port city.
In a previous job, I did the math for shipping goods from Melbourne to Perth here in Australia via freight train. It worked out to be 1 litre of fuel per ton moved 500km. In imperial, that is 1 ton at 930MPG! That efficiency is mind blowing but it does rely on a lot of goods to be moved to gain that scale efficiency.
Replacing shipped blueberries with locally farmed ones definitely could be a wash or a loss, environmentally, for sure I agree there. But we have relatively efficient industrial scale farming in the US as well, if we admitted that blueberries are seasonal we could grow them in big efficient farms and then just ship them less far.
A lot of fruits freeze pretty well too. When I'm in Maine at the right time of year and big boxes of "wild" local (low-bush) blueberries are for sale, often they're already frozen. I agree that local fruits during their short local season can be pretty good but stuff that's shipped in or frozen isn't necessarily bad. Depends on the produce.
For sure the cost of carbon and other pollution should be factored in. But I don't think the externalities are that large really. I would be surprised if the cost would go up more than 20% if we had a proper carbon tax in place. At least after the market adapts.
lol, what? I have blueberry bushes in my yard, they were like $5. i put them in the ground and then ignored them for years. It is true that not every piece of land can do what i did here, but these sweeping "marvel at the advance of farming" ideas are silly to me. I had a peach, plum, orange, and fig tree in my back yard growing up in california. When we sold the house the new owners tore them down. I think that's sad. Fresh, free fruit every year?
Now, growing enough of one thing to be able to sell it to turn a profit might have "greater externality" but even that might not be true depending on the methods used. There are composting farms where people bring their refuse - specifically "anything that was alive recently" can go in the compost, and this will provide nutrients and soil amendments in a sustainable way to that farm, which can then provide nutrition to the community it serves.
You can't feed the planet with a small, self-sustaining farm. But this idea that it's a net negative needs to DIAF.
Yeah, a carbon tax is the way to go. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you are right that the externalities aren’t huge on this one, but it would be good to take them into account regardless.
It entirely depends on how many externalities are created as debt to the future in order to ship blueberries around the world. Internalize those externalities and the grinding force of the market will eventually eliminate or mitigate them.
The future we should all be striving for is one of extreme abundance for everyone, not forcing everyone into hair shirts.
