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Transportation has a large impact on the varieties and quality of food available. Excessive handling creates waste and even drives your shopping habits; damage
by tcdent 11y ago
Transportation has a large impact on the varieties and quality of food available.
Excessive handling creates waste and even drives your shopping habits; damaged fruits and vegetables don't last as long on the shelf so you have to pursue 'fresh' food regularly. Growers choose varieties based on transportation before taste or health.
It's not uncommon for someone harvesting their own root vegetables or apples to store one season's harvest for most of the year (my grandfather advocates a wooden barrel filled with sand). Almonds, and other nuts, are only harvested once a year and stored for distribution to meet demand.
In the US, modern perceived limits of 'fresh' food and expiration are greatly exaggerated, driven by the abundance of inferior product.
- lifeformed 11y agoSeems like it'd be easier to improve upon that transportation bottleneck instead of something as drastic as restructuring the whole system and growing in urban areas.
- tcdent 11y agoSeems like it would be harder to re-engineer food transportation to be virtually shock-free. You'd have to revolutionize all packaging, sorting, loading and transport for each product. Even handling when picking has an impact on shelf life; field workers aren't encouraged to be lax with their time. As opposed to the alternative, where you walk a few steps to your garden and pick, sort, pack, transport, unpack a few minutes per day yourself.