A green tip from A Fresh Squeeze – Global Warming & Real Tomatoes

[REPOST from A Fresh Squeeze - Seattle]

What Are Your Veggies Capable Of?
Combating Global Warming with Real Tomatoes

Let’s take a local, heirloom tomato. It’s got a funky, irregular shape. It’s a little yellow, a little red. When you pick it up, it’s soft, delicate; it almost feels bruised. It’s like nothing else, not even like the other heirloom tomatoes in the bin.

Compare this with your typical mass-produced, agribusiness tomato: hard, round, red, bland. Biting into one, you notice a mealy texture.

Seven Wonders for a Cool Planet, a new book by Eric Sorensen and Sightline Institute, holds up the local, vine-ripened tomato–the “real tomato”–as one of seven everyday things that can help us solve global warming.

Here’s how:

That bland, supermarket tomato described above? It was grown using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and picked hard and “mature green,” ethylene gassed to make it red. It traveled 1,500 to 2,500 miles to market; there’s even about a one in three chance that it was imported. Tens of thousands of tons of carbon-dioxide emissions are released when we grow, process, and ship tomatoes like this.

Our local, vine-ripened friend, on the other hand, didn’t have to travel as far to the table. There’s a better chance that it was produced organically, without the fertilizers and pesticides that are responsible for more than one-third of the energy used on U.S. farms. Because it didn’t have to travel thousands of miles in a refrigerated truck, it’s softer, juicier–more delicious.

And what goes for tomatoes goes for other fruits and vegetables, too. Buying local and organic, whenever we can, dramatically reduces the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the food we eat. Research shows that distributing food across continents releases five to seventeen times the carbon dioxide of local distribution. Supporting local agriculture is clearly the solution for reducing the impact our diet has on our climate.

What can you do? Seek out local, organic food at a neighborhood farmers market, join a CSA, or look into starting a P-Patch or growing produce in your yard. Read about the hundred-mile diet and the slow food movement. Engage in political efforts to improve food production.

Eat well. Bon appétit!

The other six wonders for combating global warming are the library book, clothesline, bicycle, ceiling fan, microchip, and condom. Read more here.

Read my review of Seven Wonders here.