This terrible meme has been making the rounds on twitter and instagram, and @Greenpeace even shared it on their channels with the caption "the problem with our food system in one picture".
There are lots of problems with it
There are lots of problems with it
1. The first and biggest warning is the lack of attribution. Who took the photo? And how do we know it corresponds with the map on the bottom. Photo could have been taken in SE Asia, but the meme creator assumes & implies it's an American-sold product.
2. Shipping, both domestic + international, is only 6% of total food system emissions. Processing and packaging are another 9%. Certainly this could be improved, but it's hardly the biggest problem.
3. Yes plastic sucks, but packaging can reduce food waste. Canned & packaged fruit is wasted 4x less in the US than fresh produce!
4. Was the fruit packed in heavy syrup, w/ added sugars making this unhealthy? Or juice, which can come spent & processed pears, making prepackaged products like this more sustainable as another use for otherwise wasted food.
5. Argentina is a big exporter of pears because they just don't grow & ripen in the northern hemisphere spring. This adds to agricultural income without having to rely on overproducing other less sustainable products like beef! Pears grow very efficiently in their climate.
6. It's possible that this *was* shipped back to US retail from Thailand packaging & processing. But that doesn't necessarily reflect a problem with our food system; it could reflect our globalized economic system of outsourcing for cheap processing labor or bad tariff laws.
I'm not a proponent of international fruit processing corporations over fresh & local fruit. This is all just to say that we need to confront sanctimonious arguments & bad evidence critically, and to not automatically assume that alternative foods & systems are more sustainable.
