Low-impact living with Jane Powers
I want to talk about air travel this week, and about some exotic locations and their distances.
Kenya: 7,263km (4,513 miles). Zimbabwe: 8,679km (5,393 miles). Guatemala: 8,339km (5,182 miles). Chile: 11,449km (7,114 miles).
These are the countries that some beans, peas and grapes flew from in order to sit in the chilled compartment at my local supermarket. The distances are those from the major airports to Dublin.
Isn't there something absurdly unsound about eating a bean that travelled more than 7,000km through the air to get here? Or a grape that was air-freighted more than 11,000km? But they're not even luxuries - in terms of their price, that is.
The beans cost €1.65 for 200g. The grapes sell at €2.99 for 450g.
We may not be paying a realistic price at the supermarket till, but you can be sure that someone, or something, is. That something is definitely the environment. With no tax on aviation fuel, the skies are filling up with greenhouse gases as we rush to bring out-of-season raspberries from the fruit fields of America to our kitchens in Ireland.
Someone is paying a price, too, as likely as not. How can we know the conditions of the workers in a factory farm on the other side of the world? Whether they are being exposed to pesticides or to other hazards, if their wages are fair, or if their own food chain suffers because they are growing cash crops to send to richer nations?
As financial folks are fond of saying, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. So, €1.65 for 200g of refrigerated green beans from Kenya? What do you think?
I'm not suggesting that we should confine our intake to Irish-grown spring greens and last year's tired potatoes and onions, but we might think twice about buying produce that has flown halfway round the world. Food that has been shipped is much easier on the planet's resources (and if it is "fair trade", then you know that its growers are not getting a raw deal).
Locally-grown produce, of course, is better for the environment - as long as the farmers are not using heated greenhouses. But best of all is the produce grown in your own back yard, even if you have only a tiny plot. Distance from grower to plate: a few metres.