Organic, Local and Everything Else: The Conversation Continues...
Zoë Bradbury's story, Organic, Local and Everything Else, was a great starting point for discussing just how it is we navigate our modern food system. What questions do we ask ourselves when facing two similar products at the grocery store? Which is local? Organic? Fair trade?
Deborah Kane by comparing Breyers ice cream to Coconut Bliss (which we profiled in the Summer 2007 issue - read that story here). Zoë promised us that she'd have some answers to our questions from Coconut Bliss founders Larry and Luna. This is what Larry says about their purchasing practices:
THE FARM
"All our coconut milk is organic and all of it comes from an 880-acre farm in Chanthaburi, which is one of the only USDA-certified organic producers in Thailand. The milk is canned in 5 gallon tins in a plant owned by the same family in a nearby town (which we also visited). The farm and factory are owned by a Thai family, and their workers are paid a living wage and work under conditions very similar to those that we have observed in farms and plants in the Willamette Valley (except that the coconuts are harvested year-round and migrant workers are not employed).
DISTANCE TRAVELED
"The coconut milk is shipped to us in containers on large cargo ships, and travels around 9,000 miles to get here. While this is a long distance, sea transport uses only 12% of the fuel per pound of goods as trucks. So the coconut milk shipped from Thailand uses less fuel to transport to Oregon than oranges or strawberries trucked from southern California.
"We understand your concern about this, and this distance has concerned us since the beginning, as we are very committed to sustainability and like to buy and eat locally grown food as much as we can. We decided to go ahead with it, though, because we feel that there are several benefits that seem to us to outweigh the liabilities.
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
"These include the health benefits of coconut milk compared to dairy, and the ecological benefits of growing coconuts. Growing coconuts and producing coconut milk require no inputs (not even water), compared to the tremendous resources used to produce dairy milk. And while soybeans are grown in the US, and are the major ingredient in most of the non-dairy ice creams, the non-organic varieties tend to be grown in huge, genetically modified mono-crop operations.
"The coconut plantation in Thailand was as beautiful as any natural forest in Oregon, abounding with wildlife, and I cannot say that I've found dairy feedlots or vast soybean monocultures, whether conventional or organic, anywhere near as beautiful enjoyable!
SMALL SCALE PROCESSING
"The whole issue of ingredient sourcing has been very complex and at times frustrating for us, and I think that the challenges that food processors face in sourcing local ingredients would be illuminating for this discussion.
"From our explorations, it is much more likely that the strawberries in Breyers ice cream come from China or Poland than from the northwest--not because they prefer these sources, but because the processors from whom they buy the strawberries need to source them from all over the world to be able to provide a consistent year-round supply. All of which is a great reason not to make food on a large scale."
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