Grown in Argentina
Packed in Thailand
Put into an off-limits dumpster and thrown away in the US
Ibn Battuta has been widely celebrated for over 600 years for being such a widely traveled man
Nowadays we send fruit on longer voyages than him to save 4 cents a unit
globalization and market based supply chains baby let's go :lets-fucking-go: (unnecessiarily pollute the planet with transport costs)
A plant turned carbon in the air into fruit and more plant, so we corrected that by transporting that fruit thousands of miles and burning so much carbon to put it into plastic and then burnt more carbon transporting it even more thousands of miles to be thrown out before being sold.
Gots to exploit the cheap labor in the lower income country :porky-happy:
What was the argument made by that Br*'ish youtuber who argued that this is actually a prove of capitalism's efficiency?
There's a significantly larger market for these fruit cup things in Asia than anywhere else, with pears being grown all over. Apparently the packing machinery is so sophisticated that it makes more sense to ship pears around the world, and supposedly the time spent in transit ripens them, where global supply chains would just be crippled by storing pears somewhere temporarily to let them ripen.
It's one of the least egregious examples of market inefficiency in some ways, ocean freight is relatively ecological compared to automobile shipping, but we have to ignore the elephant of unsustainability in the room with regard to any kind of plastics packaging and energy generation used in shipping.
canning has been bastardized by the plastics industry. metals are very easy to recycle/reuse and are better for storing food (no microplastics, doesn't deform/degrade under heat). this plastic crap isnt real canning, you need metal or glass so you cant heat what you're storing to create a vacuum
Unfortunately they line cans with plastics now so you've still got microplastics. But they are recyclable and you can burn off the (very thin) plastic lining in the process, so it's way better.
i wonder what prevented and still prevents sophisticated processing infrastructure from being developed near where labor intensive, extractive systems generating "raw material" developed. lol just kidding, it's not a mystery at all!
also, saying ocean freight is ecological compared to automobile shipping is a crap comparison. just about everything is ecological compared to automobile shipping. the fuel used for maritime shipping is like a step above asphalt and extremely carbon intensive. carbon emissions for the maritime sector was at the same level as the entire country of Germany in 2018 (the #5 emitter) and is expected to balloon up by 250% before 2050.
maritime shipping is largely ignored by international climate talks because no nation wants to take responsibility and it's heavyweights typically enjoy weird extralegal territorial statuses and can play shell games like no other industry. like a dozen companies can have a stake in a single ship, through a complex network of ownership.
maritime shipping is a serious ecological problem and will continue to be so until it is decarbonized.
https://www.wired.com/story/container-ships-use-super-dirty-fuel-that-needs-to-change/
short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS2cszwTTcg
Yep, the whole thing that makes this kind of process "economically efficient" is that the environment is footing most of the bill. If you factor in environmental destruction into the equation it's no longer "economically efficient".
We have nuclear aircraft carriers and icebreakers already, time to take the leap.
Now if they stopped using oil and replaced it with nuclear reactors or sails we might get somewhere
:niko-speen: around the world, around the world :niko-speen:
I've seen them come from China before the Trump trade war, and now they come from Greece.
I miss Chinese peaches
We do this with seafood here in Norway. Ship it off to the other side of the planet to get processed and packaged, and back again to the local grocery store.
my fave is still Scottish fish getting caught in Scotland, shipped to China to be canned, then the cans being shipped back to Scotland
TFW a sack of fruit generates a larger carbon footprint than you do in a year because a computer told some executive that it would be $0.07 cheaper this way
Thought it said "picked in Thailand" and I was having a very, very hard time understanding how that was possible.
Friendship ended with a Very Long Bridge Across The Pacific. My new best friend is A Very Long Branch Across The Pacific.
