You are hearing it everywhere BUY LOCAL and for good reason. Buying local ensures those around you have jobs – you are looking after your fellow citizens and encouraging enterprise in your own backyard. Businesses are likely to be smaller, rather than huge multi-national conglomerates. You are more likely to know how things are grown and produced, or it would certainly be easier to find out. Traceability is often just a few phone-calls away. And you are cutting out air miles (reducing the carbon footprint) and shortening travel times so food is likely to be fresher and there may well be less packaging, including plastic ‘bubble wrap’ or plastic ‘pillows’, plastic outers and tape and plastic banding. All of this is easy enough to get your head around. But there are many things a country does need to import. And imports do add variety to a modern diet. But do we need asparagus in winter? Strawberries year-round? Nope. I don’t think so (you may disagree). Lemons? Mmm. It would be hard to live without them, I think (again, you may disagree). But those damned stickers applied to each piece of fruit? Those stickers take more than a lifetime to break down, if ever. Are they stuck on by growers or supermarkets? Perhaps it is to prevent rip-offs, say inferior Kiwifruit being sold off as New Zealand Kiwifruit? Please feel to free to comment in the box below. Start a discussion, let’s get chatting …
Back to local produce … New Zealand produces fantastic garlic. It is harvested through the summer months and is on sale for about 9 months of the year. You can always tell New Zealand garlic because the shaggy root ends are NEVER trimmed. It’s just as easy to spot Chinese garlic a mile away, looking pristine, unnaturally white and shorn to the end of the corm. Californian garlic looks more like New Zealand garlic, although it is trimmed, and is a good standby between our seasons.
Buy local. Do mostly when I can. Unless goods are mislabelled.
Purchased some Gold Kiwifruit a couple of weeks ago, labelled ‘NZ grown’. Don’t think so. They have never ripened, hard as nails. What a ripoff!! Why do we have to import Italian or from South America? Why can’t we do without and wait for our own produce to come back on the market?
Managed to buy NZ garlic all last year and so far this year. Let’s hope it keeps on.
Would buy Organic but who can afford it all the time. So we buy food full of insecticides and all the other ..cides and hope for the best. Why can’t we be told that, although it’s fresh, it has been sprayed. Would we think again and not purchase it?
But we are still living in a pretty good country. Aren’t we?
I agree with you! All those silly little stickers on fruit a so unnecessary. If the shops have them well labelled when on display as to what they are and where from they are not needed. The producers could save money by not using them. Let us get rid of them!
Wasn’t the last year or so that some enterprising Year 13 students devised a labeling system that wasn’t stickers on fruit. Can’t someone fast-track producing these stickers so that we don’t have to have stickers on our fruit – hopefully it breaks down in compost or landfill? Likewise the enterprising teens in Northland who had trialed the use of an insect that would consume tradescantia which smothers our bush floors and prevents the natural regeneration?