Canada: Mexican tomatoes can be more sustainable than local ones

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 ...