The mind boggles
kleipieper
Posts: 563
I’d better warn you all straight away, because I really need to have a good rant 
.
I don’t often buy veggies because I grow my own, but I had run out of onions and didn’t want to start on this year’s crop yet, so I decided to buy some.
I needed a few things from my local Aldi and had a look at their onions while I was there. They were in 2 kg nets and didn’t look very fresh. Many of them were damaged and some even had bits of mould. Price, €1, 99 per net.
And when I had a look at the label to see where they came from I almost fell over…. Those onions came all the way from New Zealand! I can’t imagine that something as basic as onions can’t be found closer to home!
Next to the onions were the potatoes. Only one variety and those came from Israel, at €2,99 per bag of 2.5 kg.
I didn’t need potatoes because I’ve been eating my own new ones for at least a week now, and I know that many commercial growers here in the region have been harvesting them for a couple of weeks as well. Yet Aldi, and probably other supermarkets as well, are still shipping them in from abroad.
Of course I didn’t buy the onions, but went to the other side of town to the only independent greengrocer that has survived here.
There they had lovely fresh onions which came from a field less than 15 km from my home. And the price? Only 75 cents per kg!
They also had at least 4 varieties of locally grown ( less than 10 km from my home) potatoes for 80 cents per kg!
I know that supermarkets need large quantities of products, but onions all the way from New Zealand ???
Posts
I always wonder what on earth they do to all those veg from abroad to keep them fresh. They don't taste very good either - no flavour at all
Sounds crazy but I guess shipping onions from NZ makes commercial sense or they wouldn't do it.
As to the environmental impact.....
I buy salad spinach quite often, the stuff from Spain is really good during winter, but the stuff from the UK that arrives in spring in often quite manky in comparison. Which I presume is down to much nicer weather in Spain.
I do grow it myself now and then, but the pigeons are up way before I am.
Billericay - Essex
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit.
Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
It's absurd flying vegetables round the world - surely we could produce enough here and cut down on the air miles. It does make me furious as well.
We started buying veg from the local farm shop until we discovered a lot of the veg at the farm shop were imported as well. I was astounded
Not veg related, but a few years back we stopped at a garage on a hot day to get some drinks. I as usual had milk (cheap and UK produced ) my wife bought the cheapest still water they had, ( still dearer than my milk ) and it came from CANADA.
I do admit to buying a lot of dutch strawberries this year as so far they have been much tastier than the local Norfolk ones. But mine are now ready, and they are better.
In Australia, we often see garlic in Woolworths and Coles that have come from China, citrus from USA, and other vegetables from Mexico and Chile!
I always opt to live without them until our Australian products appear on the shelves. I must admit that Aldi do try to market products from Australian growers, but they often have to buy elsewhere.
And what would you have done if you'd gone to the farm shop in the winter and there wasn't the range of fresh fruit and veg that you were used to? You'd have gone somewhere else - back to the supermarket probably - and bought the things you wanted. The farm shop would have gone out of business, the shop staff would have lost their jobs and the growers would have had nowhere to sell their produce again as they're not big enough to supply the supermarket. They'd have gone out of business and the land would've been sold to the big agri-businesses.
Onions from New Zealand - of course - Europe has imported onions seasonally from NZ for years Onions don't grow all year round in the UK - English onions will be harvested later this summer and will store through the winter, but they won't last in store until this time of year - are you prepared to go without onions for three months? Kleipieper found somewhere with newly harvested onions - great - but would they have had them a month ago and did the producer have enough to supply all the other shops in the area?
I'm amazed that gardeners don't seem to understand about seasonality
Buying Dutch strawberries? Grown in hothouses - so don't tell me you're concerned about airmiles and consequent pollution of the planet then. Hothouses use fuel too!
But everyone want strawberries and salads out of season and if they can't get them from the farm shop they'll go where they can.
People want new potatoes earlier and earlier in the season - in the UK we used to wait until the Jersey and Cornish ones were ready, but the demand from the customer is for new potatoes (they don't have to be peeled - no onehas time to peel a potato any more) so they're imported from Egypt and Israel, then Majorca and the Canaries, until the UK ones are ready. Kleipieper's potatoes in Aldi won't have been shipped in over the past few days - they'll have been shipped in earlier and been in storage in the importer's big storage facilities - then the more local ones will have been ready and the imported ones will not have been wanted by the more expensive supermarkets, so the importers will have sold them off cheap to Aldi - that's how Aldi keep the prices low - they buy the veg the other supermarkets don't want.
What do you spread on your toast in the morning? Is it English butter? Or is it Flora or a similar spread? Where do you think the sunflower and palm oil comes from to make those spreads? We don't grow enough sunflowers in the UK, and no palm oil grows here. If more people ate English butter and English cheese (or do you buy NZ cheddar 'cos it's cheaper ?) then the dairy farmers in the UK wouldn't be going out of business at a rate of knots (leading to the the old pastures being ploughed and the consequent lack of diversity of flora and fauna) and they wouldn't be being screwed over by the big supermarkets reducing the price they pay for their milk. Do you buy locally produced milk - or do you buy the cheapest ?
And do you think those airplanes travel to New Zealand empty? Of course not - they're carrying this country's exports to sell abroad - otherwise the UK would go bankrupt - we exist on international trade.
How do I know? My family have been farmers since the year dot, and my brother is a big onion and potato producer for the supermarkets and my OH is the Fruit and Veg manager for a farm shop.
I could go on - life's more complicated than a lot of people realise
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Sugar too Dove. I always buy British sugar.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
It works both ways.
Haha, reminds me of the 6 years I lived in Mauritius as a child we used to chew on raw sugar canes.
Consumers are much to blame - as you say we want certain things all year round. I suppose if we want the good life we'll just have to get an allottment.