But at what cost? How much should we sacrifice so that blueberries exist year round?
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.
Grow your own and the difference is extreme between that and a mealy, flavorless storebought
Remember when toothbrush advertising demonstrated how the brush was so soft it wouldn't affect a tomato, let alone your gums? That demonstration makes no sense now.
Stuff is often in season in the US, and at that time, it's generally good in the supermarket. Then there's when it's not in season.
Contrast green beans shipped from 1500km away on a boat, arriving 2 weeks to a month later at the store, kept "fresh" by all sorts of waxy residue, and other "agents" sprayed on them with .... green beans canned within 2 hours of being picked.
Where I grew up, in a rural area, we had a local canning plant. They'd get farmers to plan to harvest on a schedule, and they'd literally be canning as the farmer drive trucks up with produce. No joke, they were canned within 2 hours, often faster, and that's how it's done these days.
Which has more vitamins? Which has more nutrition? I'd lay a bet that the canned stuff is far better, far better than something that has artificial stuff sprayed on it so it looks good (artifical 'wax', and various chemicals to keep it "fresh"), and spent weeks getting to the supermarket.
Oddly, I've seen people dump out the water in the can. What? That's where a lot of vitamins live!
Food just tastes better in other countries.
This should be corrected to fruit and vegetables taste better in regions where they are grown. Which is obvious, because picking them before they are ripe and transporting them thousands of kilometers for days or weeks is going to yield a less tasty fruit or vegetable. Also, plants bred for longevity of their fruit will obviously not be optimizing for taste.
Personally, when it comes to fresh produce, I'd rather only be able to eat mostly what can be grown in season somewhat close to me (which would include greenhouses), rather than be able to get anything all year round and having it suck.
You really have to define what you mean by "supposed to taste like." As in "supposed to taste like what occurs in nature without human intervention" is very different than "supposed to taste like after humans have spent generations cultivating them to be the sweetest variety" which is different than "supposed to taste like when they are cultivated to optimize for logistics."
I suspect what you're referring to with the tomatoes is the last example, because they have been grown and picked to best withstand transit.
Where the problem lies is the changes made to fruits and vegetables to make them last the long journeys that they have to make from places that have longer growing seasons or cheaper labor.
Try a locally grown heirloom tomato in the summer in the American Midwest and you’ll get a phenomenal tasting fruit. More interestingly, try a bunch. It will be hard to say what a tomato is supposed to taste like because of the variety in flavors that come from location and breed.
Americans shop with our eyes, not our mouths.
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.
Concepts like cost and value are much deeper and richer than economic cost and economic value.
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.
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.
This is where the last mile problem comes in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation)
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.
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.
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.
* 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
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.
Worse, they mocked it and still do with terms such as "banana republic". They haven't even learned any better.