Canada: Mexican tomatoes can be more sustainable than local ones

게시됨 2021년 5월 3일

Tridge 요약

This article highlights the dilemma of sustainable eating in Canada during winter months, when local produce is scarce and imported food has a larger carbon footprint due to transportation. However, it challenges the notion that locally grown greenhouse vegetables are more sustainable, pointing out that tomatoes grown in Mexican fields have a smaller carbon footprint than those grown in Canadian greenhouses, especially those heated with natural gas. The article also discusses the potential of more efficient and less emissions-intensive greenhouse heating methods, such as geothermal and solar heating. Additionally, it touches on other environmental and social factors to consider when evaluating the sustainability of vegetables, including water use, fertilizer and pesticide pollution, biodiversity impact, and working conditions of farmhands.

면책 조항: 위의 요약은 정보 제공 목적으로 Tridge 자체 학습 AI 모델에 의해 생성되었습니다.

원본 콘텐츠

Finding sustainable produce in a Canadian winter is cause for nightmarish confusion. Months of eating in-season vegetables — cabbage, carrots, celeriac — compete with the looming environmental impacts of imported food. Many people buy local, believing the tomatoes, peppers, and other vegetables grown locally in greenhouses are more sustainable than imports that are trucked thousands of kilometres to Canadian shops. But shopping sustainably doesn’t always mean buying local. A tomato grown in a Mexican field and trucked north is about six times more climate-friendly than one raised in a Canadian gas-heated greenhouse. “In B.C., we’ve opted to use Dutch-style heated greenhouse systems,” said Michael Bomford, a professor of sustainable agriculture at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. “These are extremely high-yielding systems if you look at the output per square metre of the greenhouse itself… The problem, of course, is that the energy input that is going into that system is also ...

출처: Nationalobserver