When doing our daily grocery shopping the other day, I thought I’d make one fun exercise and see where our food actually comes from. The result: all over the place. Or, to be more exact, all over the planet. While some fresh produce like salads, onions etc. come from Finland (i.e. “locally” with transportation distances of max. few hundred kilometers), a lot comes from faraway places. Like these basic things:
- Oranges: South Africa
- Mangos: Ivory Coast
- Cantaloupe: Spain
- Cheese: Italy
- Sesame-seed oil: Netherlands
- Bananas: Costa Rica
- Almonds: USA
- Beef: Brazil
- Spices: India
So a simple, basic shopping trip consists of getting goods from five continents. And even with all this produce flying around, we can’t get decent corn in Finland for anywhere near reasonable prices. Good chilies can’t be gotten period, which is why they have to be homegrown – but you can’t grow everything yourself. By coincidence there was an article in today’s Helsingin Sanomat about ingredients of “Finnish” foods also coming from all over the world, this awareness sparked by an incident where dioxin-laced guarkum, indirectly from India or Pakistan, poisoned some cream products. Even such Finnish staple foods as rye bread can have ingredients from several countries, so “Made in Finland” should really just be “Assembled in Finland” also for food.
Seriously though, all this trafficking raises some questions; what if all global shipping was stopped for some time? What happens to peoples’ diets when air travel became prohibitively expensive for shipping groceries and it no longer makes sense to fly them from halfway across the planet?
It’s not just a matter of taste either – eating healthily around the year is simply not possible if one were to rely purely on Finnish stuff. We already know that healthy food costs more as it is (How about those tax cuts for healthy foods? Earth calling the government, hello?) but if the price gap between healthy and unhealthy food increases further in the future, we’re looking at (an even worse) a national health problem also.
August 27th, 2007 at 20:03
It is possible to eat healthy even in Finland. We just have to start conserving the food for winter – as our grandmother did and as they still do in Estonia and Russia.
We can also, easily, grow some fruits and vegetables in Finland, even in the middle of winter. We have 5 nuclear reactors, which only heat the Baltic Sea. The reason the heat is not used for greenhouses is political: it would give some farmers a great advantage. I am sure we can overcome this political problem.
And when flying fruits become too expensive, they can still be shipped by ships.
I think bigger threat, globally, is loss of farmland due to erosion and salination. And also apparent peak of phosphate – which may reduce the crops a lot.
But your post is a very interesting and important one.
August 27th, 2007 at 22:19
Using the heat from nuclear power plants for growing stuff is what I’ve been wondering before, too. In fact, I once calculated how many hectares of greenhouses we could light & heat with the fifth nuclear power plant but I forgot how much it was – a lot anyway
I’m thinking if we _must_ have a new plant, let’s use it to grow healthy food domestically instead of subsidizing paper production.
Shipping fruit by ship won’t (doesn’t) really work that well. Even now they’re picked basically raw and artificially ripened on the way or in the warehouses, which isn’t good for taste or nutritional value.
But sure, globally there are many much more severe problems (like loss of farmland & water issues) than getting fresh fruit to us here in the arctic.