Archive for December 14, 2009
Reduce: Summer Fruit Food Miles
It’s summer in Australia and that means it’s hot. I live in Queensland, so that means it’s bloody hot! (Ok, South East Queensland isn’t hot to the rest of the Queenslanders, but it is to a lot of the outside world.) My point is, it’s too hot to stand in the kitchen over a hot stove. Summer in Queensland is typically the season of salads. Among others, there’s pasta salad, Greek salad, potato salad, Ceasar salad, mango and avocado salad and (my favourite) – fruit salad!
Fruit salad is soooooo good on a hot summer day!
I’ve been going to town with the fruit eating lately, and I’m not generally a fruity person (fruit is sticky and I really dislike being sticky). The fruit is so cool and refreshing though, that it’s worth getting a little messy to enjoy it. Plus, then you get to have a cool shower afterwards (or a jump in the pool or ocean) to cool off. Mangoes and melons are my particular favourites, and the best thing about them at this time of year is that they’re all in season (you can check here). This means they’re cheap, but as well as that, buying ‘in season’ fruit means you tend to buy local.
Queensland, in particular, grows a heck of a lot of summerfruit (stone fruit, like peaches, plums, apricots and nectarines), melons (such as watermelon, rockmelon and honeydew), pineapple, bananas, passionfruits, pawpaws (papaya) and mangoes in the summer. Queensland farms also grow less well known fruits in summer, like dragon fruit, lychees and longans (which Yankee Elv likes to eat for breakfast). Basically, pretty much every succulent, juicy fruit you can imagine wanting to eat in summer, we have here in cheap, local abundance. I love it!
Now, when I say local, in some instances I really mean local – mangoes are in season all around me, for instance – the neighbours have a massive tree they’ll never completely harvest because it’s just too tall, so the possums, flying foxes and fruit bats are going to have a feast. It gets me every time I go out on the back verandah. There’s this mango tree up the road that I pass on the way to the bus in the mornings… it is so laden with fruit it’s all I can do not to jump the fence and start in on it. Only the fact that it’s not cool to steal, and that it must be a mid-season variety (the fruit is only just starting to get a pink blush on its very full cheeks) is stopping me! We have pawpaws, bananas and passionfruits in suburban backyards and along fences all over the place. Mmm mmm good!
In other instances, though, Queensland isn’t quite that local. Some people, like Asphyxia from Fixie’s Shelf, live in smaller states (in her case,Victoria), so just consider the whole state local. That won’t work for Queensland though. You’ve got to remember – you could fit the US state of Texas more than five times into Queensland. We have a lot of area (no, not as much as you guys in Western Australia, but let’s not go there). Most folks agree that when it comes to food miles, local equals a 100 mile (roughly 160km) radius from your home. For me, that means I can go as far south as Lismore, almost as far west as Dalby, and my northern boundary is between Gympie and Rainbow Beach. To the east, I have Moreton Bay, including the islands I guess, although they’re not really cultivated. If I ate seafood though, I would be set! You can check your 100 mile local food radius using the Radius Around a Point tool – see Julie’s (from Towards Sustainability) instructions to learn how.
So what does having a huge state mean? It means that getting melons from Yeppoon (which I always considered quite close by) is about twice again as far north as I’m supposed to go, according to my radius. Not so local. That being said, I think it’s better to eat a melon from Yeppoon than a packet of biscuits from the nearby Weston’s factory. I guess for me there’s more to reducing food miles than just how far away the food was grown/produced – it also involves reducing the environmental impact of the food I eat in a more general way. In this example, I think it’s better to avoid the plastic and all of the energy expended on producing the raw ingredients and then on creating the biscuits (including the energy required to run the factory and ship the biscuits), and just eat a damned melon. The melon requires no packaging and much less energy is expended to produce raw food as opposed processed food. In addition, most fruit is shipped around Australia by electric train – a far better method than by truck or air.
Aussies are a bit greedy too, we eat most of our fruit right here in the country. Yum. There’s nothing better than a big platter of stone fruit in the middle of the Christmas table at lunch time. It’s the perfect interlude, between a morning spent stuffing yourself on Christmas treats and an evening cool enough to eat a hot dinner. Plus it’s light enough so you can spend the day in the pool without getting a cramp. Yay for local, seasonal fruit!
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