The summer months bring so much joy for many reasons, none of them more scrumptious than the presence of local fruit. Peaches, plums, figs, strawberries and the industrious blackberry all make summer time the time for fast food in Oregon.
However, there are other months—lets call these the dark months—where, as you wander into your local co-op or grocery store, the only fruit you are likely to see from Oregon is under-ripe, sad little apples or pears from cold storage, picked months earlier.
In Portland, many folks pride themselves on their locavore diet. A locavore dieter is someone who attempts to consume only food from within approximately one hundred miles away from where he lives, with the attempt of growing a lot of his own food. Some even take it to the extreme of engaging in animal captivity and raise chickens, rabbits, goats and whatnot to feed their gullets.
Many restaurants in Portland also pride themselves on their local sourcing of ingredients. In these restaurants, there is one phobia that reigns supreme amongst the front of the house, the back of it and among the customers too: imported fruit, especially bananas.
The argument goes something like this: Bananas and other tropical fruit are bad because they demand a huge carbon footprint to bring them here. Tropical fruit, naysayers espouse, is therefore unsustainable.
Here is where the hypocrisy comes in. In not one of these restaurants (and I challenge someone to correct me) will you find an absence of coffee or tea, both of which are imported and tropical. Sometimes you will even find other exotics: canned coconut milk from Thailand, bulk cashews from Vietnam, and goji berries from China. The same goes often, but not always, for locavore individuals who drink their “local-roasted” coffee to fuel their car-free bike rides to the Farmers Market.
So why do bananas and other fresh tropical fruit get a bad rap? It could be argued that it is a worker rights concern, and there would be a valid point there. The exploitation of fruit farmers in Latin America by corporate devils such as The United Fruit Company have been thoroughly documented. However, just as you can get your coffee and tea fair-trade certified, you can also get bananas that come with this somewhat reassuring label that at least the banana farmers weren’t completely screwed over.
At the end of the day, a lot more goes into calling a food environmentally sustainable than just the fuel it takes to get here. Water use, including the amount of water that gets recycled back into the earth versus what is needed to produce the fruit (“gray water,” “green water” and “blue water,” as it is called in industry speak), as well as the fuel used in production apart from just distribution needs to be taken into consideration too.
In 2006, a study conducted by the Netherlands group CE Delft outlined the total greenhouse gas emissions related to banana and pineapple production in Costa Rica. Pablo Paster, an environmental consultant and writer for TreeHugger.com, did the math from the study and concluded that “you will probably emit more greenhouse gasses on your drive to the store than emitted in the fruit’s entire supply chain.”
Fruit trees provide shade, reduce pollution, and create habitats for animals rather than destroying habitats for grain and meat production. Having next to zero fat, around 3 to 6 percent protein, sweet carbohydrates that are easy to digest and full of soluble fiber, fruit is part of the essential food groups 365 days a year. While canned, frozen and dried fruits are all okay, nothing beats plumping up a smoothie of local peaches and spinach with some ripe, organic, fair-trade bananas. ?