Raspberries, which had been on sale for 99 cents at Gerbes, small delights that usually mold before I can eat them all. Partly, I hoard these treats, eating one or two at a time. Partly, they aren't well kept before the store's overly generous sale. So I opened the fridge expecting a gray fuzzy alien presence, hunted down the plastic box, and behold! They were on the top shelf, frozen, because of fridge issues, which is a bad omen for the collard greens and mustard greens on the shelf below.
And suddenly, I've having cold raspberries glomped with Hershey's chocolate spread which had also, weeks before, been on sale for 99 cents. I plunged into this with a cup of midnight coffee, nothing special, just a couple and a half spoons of Folger's. There I am, having a happy moment before brushing my teeth and trying to sleep fast so I can be a coherent teacher the next day. There are even things blowing up on the new Grit TV, a Rodriguez blood extravaganza, Once Upon a Time in Mexico .
It should have been that last free summer midnight, a last relaxing moment, before that sea of eager, distracted, 18-year-old faces.
Alas. It turns out I couldn't let even the innocent extravagance of raspberries and chocolate be innocent. Here's what I mean.
The City of Watsonville has developed the Historic Label Art Mural Project. A series of apple box label murals have been installed throughout Watsonville’s downtown area. Some of these murals were completed with City financial support, and others were completed by private individuals without City assistance. The murals are exact replicas of box and crate labels used in the early 1900s and used to identify the product, shipper or grower, and the area of origin. The Watsonville area, as well as the Pájaro Valley in general, had literally hundreds of labels in use during this time. There are presently thirteen completed murals, created by five artists.Ok, the folks in Watsonville sound swell, but why are they packaging my raspberries?
Some folks also far away, at a Purdue site, state that "Missouri is considered a minor fruit producing state by any standard statistical measure, although there is good potential for expanded fruit production." Huh. Meanwhile, the Extension Program here will tell me that:
Missouri is home to almost all temperate zone fruit plants, including strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, currants, blueberries, grapes, apricots, cherries, plums, nectarines, peaches, apples and pears. They can be harvested from mid-May through the end of October. However, because of differences in their requirements of weather and soil and in their susceptibility to pests, some fruit plants grow better than others. Raspberry plants favor cool summer and fall temperatures, so plants grown in Missouri are often stunted and produce small fruit. Raspberries also require a well-drained soil to prevent root diseases and therefore do not grow well in clay soils.Ok. I know clay soils. I have clay soils. Maybe I can't get commercial quantities of raspberries locally grown. Maybe that's just a backyard and neighbor treat. But I feel more than a little guilt being part of the market chain that is exporting water from California, in a drought that may have become the new normal, despite predicted strong El Nino rains for this winter.
But there are problems with chocolate, too. For starters, the world supply of chocolate may be in danger. Yes, really. I know this sounds like denying Santa Claus, but there's a reason global climate change gets that "global" label stuck on:
The shortage isn’t just about the world going crazy for chocolate — it also has a lot to do with climate change. A decrease in cocoa supplies can be pinned on West Africa’s dry weather, which is only getting worse. In Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire — responsible for more than 70 percent of global cocoa supply — a study released by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture predicts a 2 degree celsius (36.5 F) increase in temperatures by 2050. Higher temperatures mean that more water evaporates into the air from leaves and earth, leaving less behind for cocoa trees — a process called “evapotranspiration.”
Further,
There’s also a fungal disease called “frosty pod,” which has ravaged between 30 and 40 percent of the world’s cocoa production. Brazil, once the world’s second largest exporter of chocolate, is now its biggest importer, after being hit with “witch’s broom,” another fungal disease that devastated the Brazilian state of Bahia in 1989. [End of Chocolate...][And here's another source to flesh out that info, from Scientific American, 2011--Climate Change Could Melt Chocolate Production.]
Beyond the threats to the supply of chocolate, if we look around very much, we have to consider the ethics of chocolate production:
For African children, chocolate poses a much bigger threat than just cavities. A 2011 Tulane University study found a “projected total of 819,921 children in Ivory Coast and 997,357 children in Ghana worked on cocoa-related activities” in 2007-2008. (I use the term “work” loosely: That implies payment, when most of these children are in fact slaves who are imprisoned on farms, beaten for trying to leave, and denied any wages.) NGOs, politicians, and even a Hershey shareholder have tried to force the industry to change, but so far, these efforts have been stymied by the powerful chocolate barons, who are surprisingly evil for folks who make candy for a living...after intense industry pushback, the Harkin-Engel Protocol that passed made certification voluntary; the idea of labeling products was abandoned entirely. In the more than 10 years since it was signed, the new rules have done almost nothing to liberate child workers in the chocolate industry. And by the way, these companies crush more than children’s dreams. They are also responsible for encouraging farmers to clear West African rainforests to make room for more cocoa plants, as well as mowing down the Indonesian and Malaysian rainforests for palm oil plantations. The multi-continent deforestation subsidized by Big Chocolate also releases tons of greenhouse gases and displaces indigenous peoples.
Sigh. That makes my few spoons of Hershey's spread a little less satisfying. And I didn't even investigate the various oils and sugars and miscellaneous ingredients included in my cheap chocolate. I begin to wish that those folks in the soon-to-be-rainforests of Louisiana and Mississippi would take up chocolate production, but that may be a pipe dream as well. Here's a bit of how chocolate is produced:
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What I made for my midnight comfort was also shipped from Ohio, home of the Kroger Company. The label itself doesn't give me any clue where the coffee beans originated. I imagine some wide blend of beans from many places. And where and how, especially how, coffee is grown makes quite a bit of difference. The Huffington Post, reviewing a study of the impact of coffee growing, reports this:
The study's authors, led by Shalene Jha of the University of Texas, found that a far larger share of the world's coffee than ever before is now being grown in direct sunlight, rather than under the shade of a canopy of trees. These full-sun coffee farms are scarcely any different from the large plots of monoculture corn and soybeans that have been vilified by environmentalists over the past several decades.And,
Much of the recent shift away from shade is due to the growth of the coffee industries in Brazil and Vietnam, the first- and second-biggest producers in the world in 2010, according to the study. The researchers found that more than three-quarters of the coffee farmland in those two countries contains no tree cover. While more people might be ponying up for an occasional $5 latte at a hipster outpost, enough of us are still buying cheap coffee that full-sun farms are expanding. The industries in these two countries are dominated by the cultivation of inexpensive, bitter-tasting robusta coffee, which is used to make instant coffee and the bulk ground coffee you might buy in a can at a supermarket.
For a more detailed and bleaker eco-statement, look here.
Of course, the water comes in a plastic jug, for reasons of transport cost/weight, since the jugs are vastly lighter than glass [Why don’t we buy our milk in glass jars anymore?]. And, as we tell ourselves when we haul loads of cans and bottles toward those community bins, "The jugs are also recyclable, at least in theory." In theory is key here:
While plastic bottles can be melted down and made into new bottles, none of the milk containers in the United States are actually made from recycled material. That's because of safety concerns over bacterial and chemical contamination, and strict FDA guidelines for the manufacture of food packaging from such secondhand sources. When it's reclaimed, plastic from milk bottles is usually turned into toothbrushes, flowerpots and children's toys, among other things. But according to the Environmental Protection Agency, just 28.9 percent of it ends up in the recycling bin. The rest may spend hundreds of years decomposing in a landfill. [Washington Post].There had been some kids' show on, early Saturday morning, the company making toys specifically from milk jugs. But I wasn't in a note-taking mode, having not yet had my first 5 cups of coffee.
And then there was the electricity that went into brewing the coffee, keeping the lights on...
That late Sunday night, I finished my comfort food, brushed my teeth and turned off the TV. I didn't sleep well.
later, bob
I think you've been led astray on the raspberries. I've been told they can grow quite well in MO. If you do a little digging (get it?), you'll find some varieties that will be good for our location. I hear raspberry bushes grow like weeds with little or no maintenance. Sounds like your kind of plant. You should get some.
ReplyDeleteB
Thanks. I do have some raspberries that grow like weeds out back, though I often don't wade through to get the berries before the birds and the raccoons do. But I haven't seen much of commercial, large-scale raspberry production around here. An odd thing.
ReplyDeletebob
A dated but still mostly valid article on consuming local:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.pbs.org/now/shows/344/locavore.html
We try to buy what little meat we eat from a local farmer, who invites all his customers out to his place once a year, so we can visit our future food.