For all the talk about the importance of local foods and the impact that shipping food from around the world has on the environment, isn’t it time to take a long, hard look at the flower industry?
In many cases, flowers are shipped to destinations around the world in refrigeration, and for no other purpose than decoration. While I am cutting down my consumption of lemons and limes in beverages because of the energy required bringing them to y glass (and because Diet Coke was just fine without a lemon for years), at least lemons and limes are capable of providing me with the vitamins, nutrients, and the calories necessary to sustain life.
To actively support the shipping of flowers across the country for the sole purpose of decorating the dinner table seems like one of the least-green things a person can do.
A lemon wedge in a glass of soda is frivolous and unnecessary, but to order a dozen roses on Valentine’s Day, in the dead of the New England winter, is downright irresponsible.
No?
