this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Gardening

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[–] [email protected] 120 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I appreciate the idea but this is a little misleading. They chose to label transportation for farmers markets but not CSA boxes. There is obviously transportation involved in both.

They highlight delivery as a step in the food delivery service, but don’t label it similarly when the consumer goes to the store to pick it up. I might argue there’s efficiency in having one delivery driver vs everyone acting as their own delivery driver.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I might argue there’s efficiency in having one delivery driver vs everyone acting as their own delivery driver.

Afaik food delivery services have drivers fulfill orders one by one. So it's essentially the same thing if you go there yourself or if the delivery driver does it.

It's more efficient when one truck delivers to multiple people. Like CSA boxes. Instead of each of those people driving their own car to the store/market and back, there's one car that delivers to them all in a single route.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Here in the UK it depends what delivery service you're using. Supermarkets have a dedicated team of staff who organise approximately 45±10 deliveries per van per day. One store I worked for had 21 vans.

That helped save the journey of approximately 900 people. I think most would agree having 20 vans on the road is preferential to having 900 cars.

On the flip side, we also have services which deliver from small local shops and get basic shopping supplies to you within an hour, and these are far less efficient in terms of their footprint.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

My farm CSA pickup is at the farm. Whereas the farmer's markets aren't.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think this is quite misleading in the sense that a full truck carrying goods is very efficient per good item when compared to everyone carrying a couple meals in their private cars.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But what if you use your bike instead :3

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

That could turn the whole situation in supermarkets' favour due to efficient supply chain.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't have a bike because if I rode a bike on these roads I'd be dead. My grown kids never even learned how to ride.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just ride on the sidewalk and almost hit pedestrians every day like the people in this city.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

There isn't a sidewalk within miles of me, or even a shoulder on the road. Just fast, windy two-lane roads with lots of truck traffic.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why is packing and distribution two items on only the last one?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I understand it like it is a service like foodora. So first they need to create the ingredients, package and sell them to the restaurants. The second packaging and delivery is home to you

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How to shorten your free time

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago

In terms of carbon emissions, WHAT you eat is far more impactful than WHERE it came from

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I tried to shorten my food chain. 107 degree Fahrenheit weather and $100 per month in water made it ridiculous to try to grow my own food.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You could try living somewhere other than hell.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Come visit the beautiful South Pole! Newly thawed and ready for development!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Fr. I live literally 20 minutes from mountain peaks on a major US interstate that close during winter because of heavy snow and it was 112 today when I got in my car today.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Easier said than done man, real estate is gnarly outside of hellish markets right now!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's ways to mitigate the amount of water used and it's retention in the soil.

I also frequently have temps in the 100's in the summer here - it's meant that there's just certain things I can't grow and some that are risky. But there's plenty of veggies that can handle that kind of heat.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

does hydroponics count as gardening?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Meat consumption adds extra steps of growing food and feeding the animals as well

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Forgot the couple people at farmers markets that buy from supermarkets.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

sure bud, just give me a garden, gardening tools, seeds and shoulder maintenance cost a vast majority cant go past supermarkets

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

And most importantly... Time.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The last two are the same. Except you are replacing 100 individual automobile trips to the grocery store at peak hours with one van driving around for 8 hours.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

No, at the market the packaging is less, sometimes even a single bag that holds everything. Some even let you bring your own bag.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I see most of the comments discussing efficiency, the inability to have your own garden, or other limiting factors. And I believe all of them are missing the point. There are many and good reasons to shorten your food chain, and efficiency is not one of them. I would expect to at least see some people (there was one exception) considering the value of doing so in their lives, but nope.

So... Not very long ago, most of the people were actually living as farmers. Eric Hobsbawm, in this book, has done a great job describing what it took for the shift to happen, during the industrial revolution. For the people to actually be forced to abandon their land and start accumulating in urban environments where having your own garden is practically impossible for most of them. And it was not good. Child labor, people starving to death, extreme poverty, extreme exploitation of human labor. Many things changed, and most of them did not actually benefit the majority of the people who were forced to abandon or sell their land in order for people who could actually afford more efficient farming approaches (through machines) to replace them while accumulating wealth in an unprecedented manner. Maybe it's worth examining this shift. Both the argument of efficiency and limiting factors, are not exactly new and are not exactly serving most of us either.

Besides the historical aspect, the how did we get here, of the long food chains. There are other aspects that make them harmful. The ones that allow for a term like "banana republic" to exist, when most of the people who use it don't pause and think what it actually means for so many people that actually get exploited so they can have their bananas, cheap and available all year (as if potassium is not abundant in every single plant food). The ones that allow for people to have access to food without actually moving at all during the day (CVD, obesity, cases where being inefficient, like... spending energy to live your life, actually improves your health, like walking, carrying some weight, cycling). The ones that allow for food to be consumed weeks, months or even years after it is produced, dramatically reducing it's quality while actually raising the cost (storage facilities, freezers, transportations through various environments).

But still, most comments at the moment and upvotes are not about those things. Except one. Interesting..

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately we were growing our own food but now have to move to a rental. Barely afford to live let alone buy stuff to grow at a rental.

Real shame. I prefer my food not packaged in plastic covered in poison.

Life aye.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'm thinking of a garden

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Misleading. How about adding the inputs before Garden/Farms? It makes more sense if we compare the efficiency of both generating and transporting one unit of food.