archenemy blog

Brian notes that Bruce Gagnon (a political organizer from Maine who lists “shoveling snow” among his interests and who thinks “growth is killing our very finite planet”) is foolish to urge us to “Shop local, eat local, and walk local” while asking for home-baked banana bread for Christmas.

In the spirit of Brian’s critique, I offer this tidbit:

It sounds mad: shipping UK-caught langoustine thousands of miles to be processed, then back again to be turned into breaded scampi and put on sale. That’s what leading seafood producer Young’s started doing last year, triggering a storm of protest from environmental campaigners.

[...]

In the past the scampi was shelled by machine in Scotland. Now it is taken first to container ports like Grangemouth and loaded into containers, which are in effect giant freezers.

They are shipped to Rotterdam before being loaded onto a huge container ship alongside around 7,000 other containers for the long haul to Bangkok.

The key part of the process takes place in Thailand, as the langoustine are peeled by hand - the way consumer research says we like our scampi.

The long journey home from Bangkok takes the frozen, peeled langoustine through Rotterdam again before a short hop across the North Sea to Grimsby, where the scampi is breaded - and then delivered to our supermarkets and our plates.

[...]

The company submitted research to the independent Carbon Trust. The conclusion was that shipping scampi to and from Thailand is no more environmentally damaging than peeling it by machine in this country.

Mike Parker, deputy CEO of Young’s, says the science is on their side.

“What they found was that there was no difference between the two, and the reason for that is simply that by moving from machine processing here in the UK to hand processing in Thailand saves a lot of energy, and obviously a lot of the CO2 emissions associated with that.

“But at the same time the C02 emissions associated with shipping to Thailand and back are actually very, very low.”

Eat globally, save the planet! Or at least, do no more harm.

People like Gagnon don’t want to solve problems (or even identify problems), they just want to feel morally superior and special, even at the cost of destroying civilization. I wonder if Gagnon, an accountant, works for a firm that ships things (potatoes, lumber, designer clothing, whatever) around the country, or if he works for a little “sustainable” shop that only services customers who live within walking distance? If the former, I think the morally correct thing to do would be to quit immediately - because if you want to call for the destruction of wealth, you should lead by example and destroy your own first.