At work we stumbled upon the horrifying fact that our garlic was being flown in from China. “How can that be?” we asked.
“It must be some mistake,” we reassured ourselves. Apparently when you call our distributor and order a tub of peeled garlic, you get the stuff flown in from China; you have to specifically ask for garlic in the vicinity of your state & pay more. Seriously?! How can garlic grown, packaged and flown halfway across the world cost less than something grown in the next county over? And when I say “cost less”, I am talking the actual dollars and cents on the invoice; the actual cost on the planet for this tub of garlic is staggering.
Let me explain on our behalf, we absolutely care about our planet; we recycle, lessen waste where we can, and we do know exactly where the majority of our ingredients come from. But in this particular case, we assumed our garlic came from the most likely state of California (when Washington state garlic was unavailable). I guess that proves even in blatantly obvious, no-brainer cases, assumptions are still mere assumptions. And of course, we now ask for local garlic and pay a few dollars more for it; because... you just can’t put a price on sainthood, right? heh.
Case in point, check this out from Slate.com: “like it or not, your diet can have just as much effect on your carbon emissions as your choice of car.”
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