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Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

But ... it's crazy that we created giant international supply chains to rush around flowers so they can be gifted with no awareness of season or region. Flowers are flown thousands of miles, and refrigerated in transit.

At some point, flowers were something we appreciated in nature. (It is interesting that we appreciate part of another life form's reproductive cycle in a relatively non-utilitarian way). Then flowers were something you could enjoy seasonally, and with a connection to the land and seasons around you.

But at some point, we decided that it made sense for jets to move flowers sometimes between continents, so you could buy roses any month of the year. And that's a little amazing and a little ridiculous.

Flowers make no demands on the recipient to enjoy other than that perhaps, they shouldn't think too much about where they came from.

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"He digs through his Book of Dougs and notices a discrepancy: One Doug gave his grandmother flowers and earned 145 Good Place points, while another Doug did the same thing and actually lost four points. It’s all about unintended consequences: The second Doug used a smartphone made by a kid in China, bought roses raised with pesticides… Michael realizes that “every day, the world gets a little more complicated, and being a good person gets a little harder.”

- The Good Place Season 3, Episode 11

[1] https://tvline.com/2019/01/10/the-good-place-recap-season-3-...

> It is interesting that we appreciate part of another life form's reproductive cycle in a relatively non-utilitarian way

Flowers evolved to attract insects to aid in reproduction. Accidentally it also turned out that humans would also be attracted by them and aid in their reproduction by farming them.

Is it just accidentally?

Yes. There’s no look-ahead in evolution.

Well, I think one could plausibly argue that the early small mammals which liked to be around flowers were more likely to survive because they could eat the abundance of insects attracted to the flowers. That effect compounds, and in general, places with lots of flowers (in the ancestral environment) tend to be pretty busy ecosystems full of things to eat.

Which is not to say that this is in fact how it came about, but it's plausible enough that I wouldn't be comfortable asserting "it's pure coincidence".

(By the way, David Deutsch asserts that flowers are, in some sense, objectively beautiful. I think he's wrong, but The Beginning of Infinity contains quite a bit on this subject.)

In recent centuries, flowers have evolved to be more attractive to humans because we've intentionally manipulated the evolutionary pressure on them. So it's not accidental, but it's our volition driving it, not the flowers'.

Sure, once we were already interested enough in flowers to bother doing that.

Sure, but insects get a pretty direct benefit from their roles in helping flowers reproduce. But when we collect or grow flowers for plants which don't also produce useful fruits (e.g. roses vs orange blossoms), we're enjoying a pretty indirect benefit of aesthetic value. How and why did we become fixated on flowers in the first place? Sure, they're sometimes brightly colored and can have complex forms -- but why do those appeal to us?

>How and why did we become fixated on flowers in the first place?

Is this really a hard thing to think about? Flowers brighten up any room. If they are fragrant, they can even liven up a room with their fragrance. It could have also been some sort of show of wealth. You had to have money to have a nice enough garden to have flowers available to cut. The oils from flowers have been used for perfumes for centuries. To me any room with no plants feels dead. Just something in the corner that is green and leafy makes a huge difference. Flowers also add color to that. There's lots of reasons for people to want flowers.

Unless you are super sensitive with allergies, you kind of have to be a little dead on the inside to not see the appeal.

> Unless you are super sensitive with allergies, you kind of have to be a little dead on the inside to not see the appeal.

I have dahlias and roses growing right now. It's not that I don't experience the appeal ... It's that I'm curious how flowers initially became appealing. I think it's a failure of imagination to just claim that flowers are intrinsically attractive and not ask any further questions.

I think you're begging the question, as someone who enjoys flowers and descends from many many generations who have enjoyed flowers. When do you suppose the earliest ancestor who gathered flowers for aesthetic appreciation was? Chimps don't do it, so far as I know. Other great apes don't. The rest of the animal kingdom doesn't use them as we do. So a whole long chain of ancestors didn't care about flowers from an aesthetic perspective, and then perhaps there was a transitional period, and now modern humans really like them. What happened?

The idea of flowers as a display of wealth or the appeal to cultural use of oils from flowers all seem too late as explanations, in that they presume that flowers in particular were already appealing.

For color and fragrance, why don't we value other natural sources in the same way? Beetle carapaces or bird feathers can be colorful and all sorts of organic matter can be fragrant. But we aren't drawn to use them in the same way, for the most part.

>For color and fragrance, why don't we value other natural sources in the same way? Beetle carapaces or bird feathers can be colorful and all sorts of organic matter can be fragrant. But we aren't drawn to use them in the same way, for the most part.

Um, people have been using feathers for a long time. The native people of the "New World" used them to the point of it being a stereotype. Also, how much of this other organic matter have you collected because of its fragrance? As far as hard shells go, there are also historical evidence of people using them primarily as protection more than a trinket to display at home.

>When do you suppose the earliest ancestor who gathered flowers for aesthetic appreciation was?

I guess it would be after we figured out how to not live in a cave. After developing ability to communicate. After we weren't the ones being hunted. Then again, how in the world am I to know when/if the first Mr Neanderthal didn't pick a daisy to bring to Miss Neanderthal in an attempt to woo her affection.

>in that they presume that flowers in particular were already appealing.

I'm really shocked that you just cannot fathom or imagine someone looking at a flower and thinking "wow, that looks really nice. i'm going to investigate it." then realizing, "wow, this smells nice too. i'm going to pick it to share with someone". then, they take it home, and they see the response it has. The Mrs says "ooh, that is lovely." Then Mr FlowerPicker says, hey, I should do that again.

>Chimps don't do it, so far as I know. Other great apes don't

The list of things that humans do that chips/apes don't do is long, so I'm curious why this one in particular has peaked to your interest to make this point. Apes don't talk and write. Apes don't drive cars. Apes don't cook food. Apes don't cut down trees and build structures to live in. What's your point?

Absolutely the development of language, tool use, cooking are all interesting. But they're all pretty easily tied to fitness in a straight forward way. Aesthetic appreciation isn't. Sure, when I encounter a flower in the wild. I appreciate it. I grow flowers and visit gardens. But those are as much statements about me as they are about flowers. We could have had minds which are drawn to different things. You treat it as obvious and uninteresting that humans became fixated on part of another kingdom of life reproducing. I also asked a question in a public and undirected way. "IDK but it's a boring question IMO" is both not an answer, not constructive, and kinda missing the point.

Flowers are relatively easy to grow in a greenhouse. Is really it economically feasible to fly them from other continent?

Yup - economies of scale + cheap labor.

We ship a lot of animal products (I think medium sized fish and chicken were some of the examples) to entirely different countries to have them processed and then sent back to us.

I've been completely amazed at seeing assembly lines in things as simple as sardine canning factories. Dozens upon dozens of workers literally just shoving sardines in cans, and they aren't sold for much. The tins actually cost more than the sardines going in them. Absolute dirt cheap wages, quite depressing to think about as somebody from the US

That said though, the domestic US flower industry could be potentially ripe for disruption if somebody wanted to front the money to do so.

Chicken is dirt cheap, like $2/kg wholesale. Price of air freight is about the same on large long contracts and twice of that over the counter. Hauling chicken two ways will increase a final product price at least threefold. Sorry, I can't believe it.

BTW, fish are mostly canned right in the sea on board of fishing vessel or on a bigger factory ship nearby.

Some articles in no explicit order with some fairly visible biases but:

https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2014/03/chicken-from-china-yo...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-seafood-industry-vulnerable...

https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/12/05/tale-fish-two-cou...

https://boingboing.net/2018/09/14/usda-approves-shipping-sla...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/china-chicken-reshipped/

https://weuseit2.com/blogs/we-use-it-2/shipping-live-hogs-po...

I'm unfortunately still not able to remember for the keywords of the one good reputable article I know of that details most of what is shipped for processing and back to multiple countries and the margins involved, but it's out there if you ever feel the need to dig into it.

I am aware of the fish being canned on board vessels and factory ships. There are still a large amount that aren't.

Here is one video demonstrating a large amount of people being involved in the simple canning of cheap sardines... It's definitely much better and more orderly than another video based out of a somewhat open-air assembly line in Portugal I believe.

https://youtu.be/WPpFjl8qeM4

I could however be completely wrong about all of this. There is some information on the internet that is not amazingly easy to find and verify. When you think about the fact there are many countries with large populaces that are still treated as literal slave labour though and also lesser quality standards involved, so more ability to quite literally cram a shipping container to the brim with whatever they want, margins are incredibly slim, but still money is being made.

Thanks for the links! As I scanned them briefly, air freight is never mentioned, and sea transportation is explicitly mentioned couple of times. This is still crazy (frozen containers has to be powered 24/7), but not unbelievable crazy.

My memory from the flight hiatus in europe 2010 (The icelandic vocano) was that roses were out of stock - couldn't be flown from east africa due to the situation.

Random link to establish some basis facts for kenyan rose industry: https://aishaflowers.com/blog/30-why-roses-from-kenya-stands...

The start of the pandemic/lockdowns also highlighted the flower global trade: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-flower-industry-cras... , including the mention of Kenya.

DDGing "Covid flower industry", there also newer articles talking about the state of the it as lockdowns in Europe eased.

We ship in lots of perishable agricultural products that in terms of value per weight or value per container are much cheaper than flowers, they are in the same ballpark as fruit and berries.

I recall some UK study claiming that even purely in terms of carbon footprint it's more effective to fly in greens from south rather than heat up greenhouses to grow them locally during winter.

Yeah, though with some interesting exceptions like Dutch orchid greenhouses. Foreign countries with cheap labor and suitable climates have a big natural advantage, but intensive scientific agriculture (to make best use of the expensive greenhouse space) and automation can apparently overcome that in some cases.

Those jets were already being used, the flowers are just using what capacity was there. It's not like FedEx/UPS/etc said we need to increase capacity for flowers. Growers took advantage of a service that was there to increase their sales while also making them available to people that would ordinarly not be able to have them.

Do you like fresh fruit in the winter? Do you like bananas? All of these things are not normal for most people in northern latitudes, yet we all now get to enjoy them.

Oh, free capacity. How nice.

Nobody said it was free. Just available.

It sounds like you are saying that air-shipped flowers ONLY use excess capacity on already scheduled flights. And then it sounds like you are implying the same about fruits, in particular bananas in the winter.

This is probably not what you meant. But, if you did, I would absolutely love to read the data you gathered this from.

No, I'm just saying that shipping things globaly became a thing, and people started taking advantage of those abilities.

A service was created, and it got customers. Only they didn't have to pay a bot farm to create fake users to hype up their service, so that may be confusing to this crowd of readers.

Are you claiming that flowers are shipped entirely (or even mostly) with unused transport capacity that would be otherwise wasted? Because that seems very unlikely.

Where are people reading this from my comment?

>But ... it's crazy that we created giant international supply chains to rush around flowers

The GP's comment made it sound like capacity was made specifically for flowers. I responded that growers were just using existing shipping capacity, and then stated shippers specifically did not increase capacity for flowers.

Where's the disconnect?

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