I’ll Bet Your Carrots Get More Leg Room Than You Do

by tristero

How much of the food you eat earns more frequent flyer miles than a rock band on a gig-packed world tour? A lot more than you might think. The link is to a site called Global Grocer, in which you go food shopping, virtually. You “fill” your cart with stuff, and as you do, you learn the probability that the food you’ve chosen is imported. When you “check out,” the program calculates the overall odds that you’ve purchased at least some imported food. Much of the stuff I looked at had a 1 in 3, or better, chance of being imported, and my typical “shopping trips” averaged 96% odds, or better. And the trend is to import more and more basic foodstuffs.

As a newcomer to food policy, it seems to me that there are a host of complex issues that intersect in food distribution and delivery. This is not one of them. This kind of routine substitution of imported food for staples that can be readily found far closer to a consumer is insane. There simply is no simple reason to fly a carrot to a supermarket in New York when perfectly fine, perhaps tastier, carrots are grown within 100 miles of the city. Talk about carbon footprints!

Oh, you object, I’m neglecting economies of scale, the cost of domestic production, and that’s just for starters. Well, yes. All the more reason to carefully re-examine food and agricultural policies. It may not be feasible any time soon to see the large-scale social changes some imagine – like the great Mark Bittman, for whom I owe a hat tip for this link (and grateful thanks for such wonderful cookbooks and recipes). It’s not likely that in the next 5 or 10 years Americans will radically change their overly meaty diet to ameliorate global warming (although, admittedly, enough Americans have changed their diet to make “organic food” a supermarket staple, something almost impossible to imagine 20 years ago). What surely is feasible is a change in the elaborate web of subsidies, tariffs, taxes, and other incentives/disincentives that encourage the kind of madness that ships garlic from China to Madison, Wisconsin because it is cheaper than getting it from a local farm.