Comment by satvikpendem
6 hours ago
It is often costlier and worse for the environment to ship locally than across the world.
https://www.wpr.org/news/locally-grown-fruits-veggies-expens...
6 hours ago
It is often costlier and worse for the environment to ship locally than across the world.
https://www.wpr.org/news/locally-grown-fruits-veggies-expens...
But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what grows where you live.
We do not have the capacity to ship food halfway round the world because picky eaters don't like the idea of eating meat and potatoes.
We do have the capacity to ship massive tonnages of grains, meat, fruits, livestock around the globe and we use it ensure sufficient pipelines to feed a billion+ global population across all seasons and weathers.
Costs at that scale are large, transcontinental railways across mountains, lifting tonnages against graivity in addition to rolling friction, braking energy and return to steady motion energy repeated for frequent stops and loading, transfer, loading times add up.
Per tonne per kilometres costs of floating container ships and binned grain ships are easily competitive.
There are points to be made about the lower tonnages of picky people foods, lobsters, fancy beef, a Bugatti Chiron tucked away amidst a cavern of self loading basic electric cars .. but there's still an underlying current need to transport food from source to demand.
The costs of global shipping transport is iron mining, steel formation, build times, fuel production, fuel side effects, and so on - fuel side effects are a bit of a pressing issue, and have been since at least that 1967 absolute banger by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald they chose to call Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity
> But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what grows where you live.
Sure, that's very much what Jill says, nice lady, actually a former first lady of the state I live in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UKu3bCbFck
> But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what grows where you live.
Depends on the food, if you're clearing land for a new crop (which many countries have done historically and still do today) then it's not sustainable. And if the native crops are simply not as good nutritionally as the new crop then it's better to eat the new crop even at the ecological cost of the native one, e.g. potatoes vs barley in Ireland.
I'm not sure what you're referring to in your second sentence, not sure why picky eaters wouldn't like meat and potatoes or what that has to do with shipping in general, not even the fact that we do indeed have the capacity and will to ship food halfway around the world already today.