Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Salad Travels: A Meditation on my Greens

http://www.cksinfo.com/clipart/food/salads/side-salad.png
Crash, bang, clatter… The sounds of Pollock Dining Commons fill the air. As I push my way past the throngs of students milling by the counter to swipe in their meal points, I can’t help but think of cattle waiting in line at the feeding trough. As I mosey my way over to the salad bar I narrowly avoid three head-on collisions, thinking “so much for my fellow students watching where they are going.” At long last, I reach the salad bar and begin to load up on lettuce and salad fixings. Atop my lettuce greens I load heap upon heap of asparagus, tomatoes, and bell peppers. I finish my salad off with a drizzle of balsamic vinaigrette. Moving on, I stop at the fruit bar to pick up grapes and oranges. Yum! In the midst of gathering my food I can’t help but wonder, where did my food come from? This is what I found:
  • Statistically speaking, my asparagus is very likely to be from one our neighbor Mexico or Peru. According to ERS data, in 2009 Mexico produced 148,421,553 units of asparagus, and Peru produced 190, 974, 059 units of asparagus (http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda/viewDocumentInfo.do?documentID=1771). The asparagus often travel by plane, a very inefficient method of travel.
  • Tomatoes, according to the Natural Resource Defense Commission, are routinely imported from, once again, Mexico or the Netherlands (see their report here: http://food-hub.org/files/resources/Food%20Miles.pdf). My tomatoes travel either by truck or freighter depending on their country of origin.
  • My yummy bell peppers can trace their birthplace to the Netherlands where they are grown in large greenhouses lit up by blazing lights, continuously producing ripe vegetables for American consumers. Bell peppers commonly travel to the US by air freight.
  • The fruit bar grapes are likely imported from Chile, travelling miles by ship.
  • The navel oranges, when imported out of season, may trace their country of origin to Australia, from whence they would have traveled by ship. When in season and economically feasible, the oranges may have travelled from Florida by truck.
Though shocking at the time, the global origin of my salad is far from surprising. Many of the commodities that I have come to love and enjoy like bananas, coffee, chocolate, fish and shellfish, apple juice, cashew nuts, and spices cannot be produced in the US, whether based upon their growth and processing habits or upon the cost of production. From 1990 to 2002 US Department of Agriculture (USDA) data shows a steep upward trend in processed agricultural product imports (see more at: http://www.ers.usda.gov/amberwaves/february08/datafeature/).
When thought of as something more than an on-the-go meal between classes, a salad suddenly takes on a new gravitas. Though it may “take a village to raise a child,” it certainly takes a worldwide effort to bring together my humble salad. Economic and ecological effects aside, the comingling of an asparagus with a tomato is a valuable reminder of the interconnected nature of the world we live in.

-Hope

No comments:

Post a Comment