Fruit From Afar
My wife said she smelled them before she even reached the produce section: nectarines. In December. Even the California crop is long over. Sure enough, they came from Chile.
She bought a pound, and they smell and taste better than any of the domestic nectarines we got during the summer. And, at $1.99 a pound, they're the same price.
The Dole website says 10% of the nectarines eaten in the U.S. come from Chile. Another site says much of Chile's fruit comes from the Aconcágua Valley. The store's flyer bears the brand name "Jetfresh"— suggesting that these nectarines are air-freighted from Chile (probably from Valparaiso) to the U.S.
It's 5,695 miles from Valparaiso to Salt Lake City, where Albertson's warehouses their products for this area. Intercontinental air frieght emits ten times as much CO2 as trucking— 1.6 pounds of CO2 per ton-mile. That means transporting a ton of nectarines to Salt Lake City adds 9,112 pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere— more than 4-1/2 tons.
Put another way, every pound of nectarines from Chile emits 4-1/2 times its weight of CO2! Compare this with .04 pounds of CO2 for each pound of nectarines trucked to Salt Lake City from Fresno, California.
We try not to buy foreign-grown fruit because of the vast amounts of CO2 its transportation generates. But it's sometimes difficult when the product costs the same as California-grown, and tastes far better.
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