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It really is amazing, that's why we really need to appreciate and protect what we have. The incredible abundance we currently have is not the norm. It was not e

It really is amazing, that's why we really need to appreciate and protect what we have. The incredible abundance we currently have is not the norm. It was not even 100 years ago that people were starving in the US during the great depression. Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent rhetoric.

CooCooCaCha 2y ago
But at what cost? How much should we sacrifice so that blueberries exist year round?
- boxed 2y ago
  What is the cost we are paying that you imply is too high?
  - password_ 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Shipping blueberries around the world can’t be great for the environment.
    - Retric 2y ago
      Why not? Bulk shipping is really efficient, local farmers markets can easily be worse for the environment than going to a supermarket. A Semi moving 35 tons at 7 MPG is 25 times more fuel efficient vs a ford F-150 moving 1/2 ton at 20 MPG and trains or boats are even better. In the end fuel costs money so more efficient logistics is often good for the environment. Buying local makes a lot more sense if you live in a farming community than a port city.
      - bee_rider 2y ago
        Replacing shipped blueberries with locally farmed ones definitely could be a wash or a loss, environmentally, for sure I agree there. But we have relatively efficient industrial scale farming in the US as well, if we admitted that blueberries are seasonal we could grow them in big efficient farms and then just ship them less far.
        ghaff 2y ago
        A lot of fruits freeze pretty well too. When I'm in Maine at the right time of year and big boxes of "wild" local (low-bush) blueberries are for sale, often they're already frozen. I agree that local fruits during their short local season can be pretty good but stuff that's shipped in or frozen isn't necessarily bad. Depends on the produce.
      - VelesDude 2y ago
        In a previous job, I did the math for shipping goods from Melbourne to Perth here in Australia via freight train. It worked out to be 1 litre of fuel per ton moved 500km. In imperial, that is 1 ton at 930MPG! That efficiency is mind blowing but it does rely on a lot of goods to be moved to gain that scale efficiency. This is where the last mile problem comes in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation)
    - boxed 2y ago
      For sure the cost of carbon and other pollution should be factored in. But I don't think the externalities are that large really. I would be surprised if the cost would go up more than 20% if we had a proper carbon tax in place. At least after the market adapts.
      - bee_rider 2y ago
        Yeah, a carbon tax is the way to go. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you are right that the externalities aren’t huge on this one, but it would be good to take them into account regardless.
      - tekla 2y ago
        The externality of a locally grown blueberry is incredibly higher than industrial farmed blueberries
        genewitch 2y ago
        lol, what? I have blueberry bushes in my yard, they were like $5. i put them in the ground and then ignored them for years. It is true that not every piece of land can do what i did here, but these sweeping "marvel at the advance of farming" ideas are silly to me. I had a peach, plum, orange, and fig tree in my back yard growing up in california. When we sold the house the new owners tore them down. I think that's sad. Fresh, free fruit every year? Now, growing enough of one thing to be able to sell it to turn a profit might have "greater externality" but even that might not be true depending on the methods used. There are composting farms where people bring their refuse - specifically "anything that was alive recently" can go in the compost, and this will provide nutrients and soil amendments in a sustainable way to that farm, which can then provide nutrition to the community it serves. You can't feed the planet with a small, self-sustaining farm. But this idea that it's a net negative needs to DIAF.
    - anonporridge 2y ago
      There's no intrinsic reason why it can't be. It entirely depends on how many externalities are created as debt to the future in order to ship blueberries around the world. Internalize those externalities and the grinding force of the market will eventually eliminate or mitigate them. The future we should all be striving for is one of extreme abundance for everyone, not forcing everyone into hair shirts.
    - RecycledEle 2y ago
      > Shipping blueberries around the world can’t be great for the environment. Look at the price to ship something. The cost of fuel burned can not be greater than the shipping cost, and it is probably much less.
      - bee_rider 2y ago
        The cost of fuel could be higher than the shipping cost, if we include things like: * the cost of cleaning up all the carbon we’ve spewed out * the cost of fossil fuel subsidies * the political cost of doing business with oil producing countries, many of which seem to be fairly hostile
  - ks2048 2y ago
    People mention environmental costs. There are also geopolitical costs. I write this from Guatemala, where 70 years ago, a budding 10-year-old democracy was destroyed so that Americans could continue to get cheap bananas. And the country never really recovered. Of course, from technology and "globalization", I think the abundance of American supermarkets would still have occurred, but this has been optimized at the expense of human rights and wages of people throughout the world.
    - oblio 2y ago
      > I write this from Guatemala, where 70 years ago, a budding 10-year-old democracy was destroyed so that Americans could continue to get cheap bananas. And the country never really recovered. Worse, they mocked it and still do with terms such as "banana republic". They haven't even learned any better.
- mtalantikite 2y ago
  My problem with it is that not only are we paying the environmental cost to have berries all year round in the grocery store, it's that they're also just shit quality. Like not just passable, but are bitter and sour and not worth it at all. And it's sort of at the expense of really good, local berries when the real season hits. For example, I live in Brooklyn and the grocery stores last summer barely had any local blueberries from New Jersey. Everything was Driscolls branded berries, and they're always bad. They look like berries, but they taste awful, or at best like nothing, 95% of the time. I don't know much about the market, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had a year long contract and the local producers get shut out during the real season. Luckily there are farmers markets and CSAs near me.
  - rrr_oh_man 2y ago
    This so much. People who live in Western cities have no fucking clue what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like. It’s like a running gag that my father complains about supermarket tomatoes, but after travelling through rural places in Eastern and Southern Europe and a little bit in Central America, I totally get it.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      Tomatoes are probably about the worst example you could pick. Fresh tomatoes can be excellent (though I'm really not a tomato aficionado) during the short period when they're in season locally in much of the US. Outside that period, the recommendation for cooking tomatoes is generally to use canned because tomatoes are an example of something that doesn't ship well.
      - wumbo 2y ago
        That’s why they’re the best example. Grow your own and the difference is extreme between that and a mealy, flavorless storebought
        ghaff 2y ago
        That assumes you care enough about tomatoes to grow them. My local farmstand probably does a better job than I could when they’re in season which is true of most of what they sell.
- RecycledEle 2y ago
  > But at what cost? How much should we sacrifice so that blueberries exist year round? Look at the price tag on the blueberries. That is the cost. The opportunity cost is that the money could have neen spent on something else. The great thing about a free market is that if you think resources should be allocated elsewhere, you can do that. Your labor is your resource. I find greenhouses to be wonderfully environmentally friendly, and do not understand why someone would object to them.
  - CooCooCaCha 2y ago
    No. Price is an amalgamation and approximation of a lot of different factors rolled into one. Concepts like cost and value are much deeper and richer than economic cost and economic value.
  - oblio 2y ago
    > Look at the price tag on the blueberries. That is the cost. We're absolute garbage at including externalities like pollution or long term effects into prices. Look at incredibly cheap plastic. It's a massive danger to everything yet a plastic bag costs cents.
keybored 2y ago
> It really is amazing, that's why we really need to appreciate and protect what we have. The incredible abundance we currently have is not the norm. It was not even 100 years ago that people were starving in the US during the great depression. This is fine and a good exercise (like a gratitude journal). The problem is that this is often used to tell people indirectly that they should stop with their political complaints, which may be well-founded. Like... > Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent rhetoric. Like this?[1] I don’t know what extremist means here but there are real political problems out there, and some of the solutions are “extremist” (like e.g. some of the solutions to climate change). Violence is less debatable and should be reserved for when it it truly necessary. [1] If you make vague gestures I in turn have to guess.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  > The problem is that this is often used to tell people indirectly that they should stop with their political complaints It's a tell that you conflate political complaints with extremist violent rhetoric.
  - Folcon 2y ago
    I would say that in this forum we try to be charitable to each other and it's certainly the way I like to conduct myself. The poster you're replying to has so far merely provided you with an opportunity to clarify or expand on what you would consider "extremist violent rhetoric". We're all pretty curious people here, and I would say reasonably opinionated, so I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to ask you to clarify your position. We're not going to get to the high level of discourse we like and expect in this space without a bit of curiosity and generous assumptions to our fellow posters =)...
  - keybored 2y ago
    Like I said, when you vaguely point to something in the Zeitgeist I have to guess. I made my assumption clear so don’t try to make this into a gotcha. Specifically extremist, violent, political[1] rhetoric is subsumed by political complaints in general. So if you mean conflate as in draw an equivalence then that is clearly a wrong inference on your part. [1] This adjective wasn’t in your original comment hence my guess.
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
nradov 2y ago
The Haber–Bosch process also played a major role there. It was around 100 years ago that cheap nitrogen fertilizer manufactured from fossil fuels started to become widely available. That greatly reduced starvation, at least in countries with functional governments.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  This was then combined with the Green Revolution, where crops were modified to truly take advantage of abundant artificial fertilizer. Before that, too much nitrogen would make wheat (for example) grow so tall and top heavy it would fall over, reducing yield in a process called "lodging". The fact that would amaze Franklin is that only about 1% of Americans are farmers.
  - VelesDude 2y ago
    Franklin would also be puzzled that there would be many people that are nutrient deficient despite calorie abundance.
    - nradov 2y ago
      It was actually common in Franklin's time for poor people with limited diets (mainly a single grain crop) to suffer from nutritional deficiencies despite getting adequate calories. Think of conditions like pellagra, goiter, anemia, etc. Of course they didn't fully understand the root causes.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      The dietary problem in the US is overconsumption of macronutrients, particularly carbohydrates, not underconsumption of micronutrients, and certainly not underconsumption (of all nutrients) as could be seen in Franklin's time. Franklin would be amazed at how little of household budgets could go to food now.
btbuildem 2y ago
> Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent rhetoric. Think about how this standard of living is enabled by centuries of colonial exploitation, mortally dependent on continued extraction of non-renewable resources, and propped up by an insanely profitable military-industrial complex. If you're on the outside, watching fools burn it all so they can drown in excess they don't appreciate.. yes, the rhetoric is bound to get violent.
- southernplaces7 2y ago
  >Think about how this standard of living is enabled by centuries of colonial exploitation, mortally dependent on continued extraction of non-renewable resources, and propped up by an insanely profitable military-industrial complex. It's a classic leftist narrative that gets very foggy on the facts when you dig closer to details. Modern prosperity and modern market economies are definitely not based on centuries-gone colonial extractive empires and while extraction of non-renewable resources is still big in the modern global economy, it applies to the needs of all states and societies, not just the apparently evil capitalist west. Or do you think the USSR and its socialist cousins along with the majority of countries that used to be European colonies all live in harmony with nature, eschewing all possible attempts to modernize through resource use? As for the military industrial complex, pray tell, of which country? Tangibly benefiting which countries and by what mechanisms to make it so "insanely profitable"?
  - btbuildem 2y ago
    I find it hard to believe your comment is in good faith, but let's give you the benefit of the doubt. > Modern prosperity and modern market economies are definitely not based on centuries-gone colonial extractive empires All the wealth and resources plundered from colonies over centuries enabled the European powers to maintain power and more easily develop technologies on which this modern prosperity so relies. One entire continent, unimaginably wealthy in a broad variety of resources, was taken over just in the most recent history. > As for the military industrial complex, pray tell, of which country? Tangibly benefiting which countries Mostly the US today, benefitting primarily the US, and by proxy many of her allies. War is extremely profitable: taxpayer dollars pay for materiel which you immediately destroy, the demand/supply ratio is fantastic. The sustained violence guarantees access to the energy resources required to continue this strategy -- the rotten mess in the ME over the past near-century being just one of the more glaring examples.

CooCooCaCha 2y ago

But at what cost? How much should we sacrifice so that blueberries exist year round?

boxed 2y ago
What is the cost we are paying that you imply is too high?
- password_ 2y ago
  [flagged]
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Shipping blueberries around the world can’t be great for the environment.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Why not? Bulk shipping is really efficient, local farmers markets can easily be worse for the environment than going to a supermarket. A Semi moving 35 tons at 7 MPG is 25 times more fuel efficient vs a ford F-150 moving 1/2 ton at 20 MPG and trains or boats are even better. In the end fuel costs money so more efficient logistics is often good for the environment. Buying local makes a lot more sense if you live in a farming community than a port city.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      Replacing shipped blueberries with locally farmed ones definitely could be a wash or a loss, environmentally, for sure I agree there. But we have relatively efficient industrial scale farming in the US as well, if we admitted that blueberries are seasonal we could grow them in big efficient farms and then just ship them less far.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        A lot of fruits freeze pretty well too. When I'm in Maine at the right time of year and big boxes of "wild" local (low-bush) blueberries are for sale, often they're already frozen. I agree that local fruits during their short local season can be pretty good but stuff that's shipped in or frozen isn't necessarily bad. Depends on the produce.
    - VelesDude 2y ago
      In a previous job, I did the math for shipping goods from Melbourne to Perth here in Australia via freight train. It worked out to be 1 litre of fuel per ton moved 500km. In imperial, that is 1 ton at 930MPG! That efficiency is mind blowing but it does rely on a lot of goods to be moved to gain that scale efficiency. This is where the last mile problem comes in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation)
  - boxed 2y ago
    For sure the cost of carbon and other pollution should be factored in. But I don't think the externalities are that large really. I would be surprised if the cost would go up more than 20% if we had a proper carbon tax in place. At least after the market adapts.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      Yeah, a carbon tax is the way to go. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you are right that the externalities aren’t huge on this one, but it would be good to take them into account regardless.
    - tekla 2y ago
      The externality of a locally grown blueberry is incredibly higher than industrial farmed blueberries
      - genewitch 2y ago
        lol, what? I have blueberry bushes in my yard, they were like $5. i put them in the ground and then ignored them for years. It is true that not every piece of land can do what i did here, but these sweeping "marvel at the advance of farming" ideas are silly to me. I had a peach, plum, orange, and fig tree in my back yard growing up in california. When we sold the house the new owners tore them down. I think that's sad. Fresh, free fruit every year? Now, growing enough of one thing to be able to sell it to turn a profit might have "greater externality" but even that might not be true depending on the methods used. There are composting farms where people bring their refuse - specifically "anything that was alive recently" can go in the compost, and this will provide nutrients and soil amendments in a sustainable way to that farm, which can then provide nutrition to the community it serves. You can't feed the planet with a small, self-sustaining farm. But this idea that it's a net negative needs to DIAF.
  - anonporridge 2y ago
    There's no intrinsic reason why it can't be. It entirely depends on how many externalities are created as debt to the future in order to ship blueberries around the world. Internalize those externalities and the grinding force of the market will eventually eliminate or mitigate them. The future we should all be striving for is one of extreme abundance for everyone, not forcing everyone into hair shirts.
  - RecycledEle 2y ago
    > Shipping blueberries around the world can’t be great for the environment. Look at the price to ship something. The cost of fuel burned can not be greater than the shipping cost, and it is probably much less.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      The cost of fuel could be higher than the shipping cost, if we include things like: * the cost of cleaning up all the carbon we’ve spewed out * the cost of fossil fuel subsidies * the political cost of doing business with oil producing countries, many of which seem to be fairly hostile
- ks2048 2y ago
  People mention environmental costs. There are also geopolitical costs. I write this from Guatemala, where 70 years ago, a budding 10-year-old democracy was destroyed so that Americans could continue to get cheap bananas. And the country never really recovered. Of course, from technology and "globalization", I think the abundance of American supermarkets would still have occurred, but this has been optimized at the expense of human rights and wages of people throughout the world.
  - oblio 2y ago
    > I write this from Guatemala, where 70 years ago, a budding 10-year-old democracy was destroyed so that Americans could continue to get cheap bananas. And the country never really recovered. Worse, they mocked it and still do with terms such as "banana republic". They haven't even learned any better.
mtalantikite 2y ago
My problem with it is that not only are we paying the environmental cost to have berries all year round in the grocery store, it's that they're also just shit quality. Like not just passable, but are bitter and sour and not worth it at all. And it's sort of at the expense of really good, local berries when the real season hits. For example, I live in Brooklyn and the grocery stores last summer barely had any local blueberries from New Jersey. Everything was Driscolls branded berries, and they're always bad. They look like berries, but they taste awful, or at best like nothing, 95% of the time. I don't know much about the market, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had a year long contract and the local producers get shut out during the real season. Luckily there are farmers markets and CSAs near me.
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  This so much. People who live in Western cities have no fucking clue what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like. It’s like a running gag that my father complains about supermarket tomatoes, but after travelling through rural places in Eastern and Southern Europe and a little bit in Central America, I totally get it.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Tomatoes are probably about the worst example you could pick. Fresh tomatoes can be excellent (though I'm really not a tomato aficionado) during the short period when they're in season locally in much of the US. Outside that period, the recommendation for cooking tomatoes is generally to use canned because tomatoes are an example of something that doesn't ship well.
    - wumbo 2y ago
      That’s why they’re the best example. Grow your own and the difference is extreme between that and a mealy, flavorless storebought
      - ghaff 2y ago
        That assumes you care enough about tomatoes to grow them. My local farmstand probably does a better job than I could when they’re in season which is true of most of what they sell.
RecycledEle 2y ago
> But at what cost? How much should we sacrifice so that blueberries exist year round? Look at the price tag on the blueberries. That is the cost. The opportunity cost is that the money could have neen spent on something else. The great thing about a free market is that if you think resources should be allocated elsewhere, you can do that. Your labor is your resource. I find greenhouses to be wonderfully environmentally friendly, and do not understand why someone would object to them.
- CooCooCaCha 2y ago
  No. Price is an amalgamation and approximation of a lot of different factors rolled into one. Concepts like cost and value are much deeper and richer than economic cost and economic value.
- oblio 2y ago
  > Look at the price tag on the blueberries. That is the cost. We're absolute garbage at including externalities like pollution or long term effects into prices. Look at incredibly cheap plastic. It's a massive danger to everything yet a plastic bag costs cents.

keybored 2y ago

> It really is amazing, that's why we really need to appreciate and protect what we have. The incredible abundance we currently have is not the norm. It was not even 100 years ago that people were starving in the US during the great depression. This is fine and a good exercise (like a gratitude journal). The problem is that this is often used to tell people indirectly that they should stop with their political complaints, which may be well-founded. Like... > Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent rhetoric. Like this?[1] I don’t know what extremist means here but there are real political problems out there, and some of the solutions are “extremist” (like e.g. some of the solutions to climate change). Violence is less debatable and should be reserved for when it it truly necessary. [1] If you make vague gestures I in turn have to guess.

brigadier132 2y ago
> The problem is that this is often used to tell people indirectly that they should stop with their political complaints It's a tell that you conflate political complaints with extremist violent rhetoric.
- Folcon 2y ago
  I would say that in this forum we try to be charitable to each other and it's certainly the way I like to conduct myself. The poster you're replying to has so far merely provided you with an opportunity to clarify or expand on what you would consider "extremist violent rhetoric". We're all pretty curious people here, and I would say reasonably opinionated, so I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to ask you to clarify your position. We're not going to get to the high level of discourse we like and expect in this space without a bit of curiosity and generous assumptions to our fellow posters =)...
- keybored 2y ago
  Like I said, when you vaguely point to something in the Zeitgeist I have to guess. I made my assumption clear so don’t try to make this into a gotcha. Specifically extremist, violent, political[1] rhetoric is subsumed by political complaints in general. So if you mean conflate as in draw an equivalence then that is clearly a wrong inference on your part. [1] This adjective wasn’t in your original comment hence my guess.

oldpersonintx 2y ago

[dead]

nradov 2y ago

The Haber–Bosch process also played a major role there. It was around 100 years ago that cheap nitrogen fertilizer manufactured from fossil fuels started to become widely available. That greatly reduced starvation, at least in countries with functional governments.

pfdietz 2y ago
This was then combined with the Green Revolution, where crops were modified to truly take advantage of abundant artificial fertilizer. Before that, too much nitrogen would make wheat (for example) grow so tall and top heavy it would fall over, reducing yield in a process called "lodging". The fact that would amaze Franklin is that only about 1% of Americans are farmers.
- VelesDude 2y ago
  Franklin would also be puzzled that there would be many people that are nutrient deficient despite calorie abundance.
  - nradov 2y ago
    It was actually common in Franklin's time for poor people with limited diets (mainly a single grain crop) to suffer from nutritional deficiencies despite getting adequate calories. Think of conditions like pellagra, goiter, anemia, etc. Of course they didn't fully understand the root causes.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    The dietary problem in the US is overconsumption of macronutrients, particularly carbohydrates, not underconsumption of micronutrients, and certainly not underconsumption (of all nutrients) as could be seen in Franklin's time. Franklin would be amazed at how little of household budgets could go to food now.

btbuildem 2y ago

> Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent rhetoric. Think about how this standard of living is enabled by centuries of colonial exploitation, mortally dependent on continued extraction of non-renewable resources, and propped up by an insanely profitable military-industrial complex. If you're on the outside, watching fools burn it all so they can drown in excess they don't appreciate.. yes, the rhetoric is bound to get violent.

southernplaces7 2y ago
>Think about how this standard of living is enabled by centuries of colonial exploitation, mortally dependent on continued extraction of non-renewable resources, and propped up by an insanely profitable military-industrial complex. It's a classic leftist narrative that gets very foggy on the facts when you dig closer to details. Modern prosperity and modern market economies are definitely not based on centuries-gone colonial extractive empires and while extraction of non-renewable resources is still big in the modern global economy, it applies to the needs of all states and societies, not just the apparently evil capitalist west. Or do you think the USSR and its socialist cousins along with the majority of countries that used to be European colonies all live in harmony with nature, eschewing all possible attempts to modernize through resource use? As for the military industrial complex, pray tell, of which country? Tangibly benefiting which countries and by what mechanisms to make it so "insanely profitable"?
- btbuildem 2y ago
  I find it hard to believe your comment is in good faith, but let's give you the benefit of the doubt. > Modern prosperity and modern market economies are definitely not based on centuries-gone colonial extractive empires All the wealth and resources plundered from colonies over centuries enabled the European powers to maintain power and more easily develop technologies on which this modern prosperity so relies. One entire continent, unimaginably wealthy in a broad variety of resources, was taken over just in the most recent history. > As for the military industrial complex, pray tell, of which country? Tangibly benefiting which countries Mostly the US today, benefitting primarily the US, and by proxy many of her allies. War is extremely profitable: taxpayer dollars pay for materiel which you immediately destroy, the demand/supply ratio is fantastic. The sustained violence guarantees access to the energy resources required to continue this strategy -- the rotten mess in the ME over the past near-century being just one of the more glaring examples.