The Cost of Shipping Food

In todays world it has become normal to have any fruit available to you at any time of the year. These fruits are not locally grown. They come from around the world to the shelves of your local supermarket. The cost of shipping oranges from Florida, Cod from Norway and lemons from Argentina is horrendous. The amount of greenhouse gasses that are blasted into the atmosphere transporting food is unacceptable. We have to learn to eat our local food even if that means not all foods are always available to us.

            Sure it is convenient to always be able to eat what you want, but what is the cost? Until recently, it was cheaper to grow and sell food locally. Now, with globalization at its peak, it is cheaper to pay laborers in poor countries to grow food and then ship it half way around the world to sell it. If we grew and sold our food locally we could boost our economy and drastically cut back on our impact on the environment.

            However, this is not true in all cases. It may actually be less harmful to grow flowers in tropical locations and then shipping them, rather then growing them in power hungry greenhouses (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/business/worldbusiness/26food.html?pagewanted=all). But aside from these few exceptions the impact of shipping greatly outweighs the cost of growing locally. The amount of greenhouse gases that could be saved from going into the atmosphere by shipping is huge, and if it were less, our planet would greatly appreciate it.

            The European union recently raised their tax on imported food by twenty percent to encourage more domestic food production. I believe this is a step in the right direction, if imported food weren’t so cheap, people would be less inclined to buy it. Tesco, a Britain’s largest supermarket chain has started printing a chart on their products assessing the carbon footprint of an item. “This may be as radical for environmental consuming as putting a calorie count on the side of packages to help people who want to lose weight,” said Trevor Datson, spokesperson for Tesco (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/business/worldbusiness/26food.html?pagewanted=all).

            The cost of shipping food is too high, and there needs to be a change. We need to release less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A great place to start would be to change how we go about food supply. People are already taking steps in the right direction, but we need to double up on our efforts or else, when we run out of gas, we’ll run out of food.