When visiting with my folks in India a few years ago, I walked to the vegetable shop like I always did. I was there during the summer, which is not when I like to visit India. For years, I timed my India trips with the December break in the academic calendar because that’s the “coolest” period in that part of the world. But, I had no choice in the timing of the trip that was necessitated by aging parents.
The owners hail from our old part of the country, deep in the south of Tamil Nadu. Despite years of life in Chennai and interactions with customers, the shopkeepers speak with that unmistakable and easily recognizable Tamil accent that is unique to the Tirunelveli region.
After picking up a few vegetables, I asked him if he had a certain tuber, siru kizhangu, that all of us love. Known in English as Chinese potatoes, it is not really a potato. Oh, unlike potatoes, which quickly diffused throughout the world from their original home in Peru, and many other agricultural produce that came from Central and South America, the Chinese potatoes didn’t come from China, despite its name, as the all-knowing Wikipedia notes: They are native to tropical Africa.
I asked the shopkeeper if he had siru kizhangu. He laughed, which is never a good sign. When a retailer in India laughs, it means that the customer has proven to be an ignoramus, which is what I was. He said I was asking for it during the wrong time of the year, and that the kizhangu comes to the market only in December and January.
I suppose with my visits having been mostly in December, I hadn’t known about the seasonality of siru kizhangu. There was a solid reason for my ignorance. I am not that stupid, your honor!
(Note: the usage of “zh” is to indicate the Tamil ழ, which is a unique sound, a sound that is not in the English language. The tongue curls and stays with the tip almost touching the upper-middle roof of the mouth, and moves oh so slightly without touching the mouth surface while the sound is made.)
There is no seasonality, for all practical purposes, when I go to the grocery store here in Eugene.
It was the end of winter. The grocery store had phenomenally tasty red grapes. Yes, crisp, sweet tasting red grapes. A fruit that is not associated with winter, for sure.
The grapes were from Peru. Down under, summer was ending and they were heading into fall.
The grapes were sold in plastic bags. After we ate them all—well, with friends—the plastic bag went into the trash can. The same trash can into which I tossed the plastic clam shell in which my favorite tomatoes are sold. Fresh, juicy, tasty tomatoes in the winter. And the plastic bags that had arugula and romaine. Healthy eating generates quite some plastic trash too.
“So Much Produce Comes in Plastic. Is There a Better Way?” asks this NYT report.
This is of concern because plastic, from its production to its disposal, is an environmental nightmare.
Reducing the use of plastic is an obvious way to push back against a changing climate. Plastic is created from fossil fuels, the biggest contributor to greenhouse gases. It chokes the oceans and seeps into the food chain. Estimates vary, but about 40 percent of plastic waste comes from packaging.
BTW, do not be fooled by all those recycling logos and numbers on plastic containers. It is a classic case of gaslighting. In case you didn’t know this before, even from my blog posts here and in the previous blogging platform, well, the Center for Climate Integrity recently published a comprehensive report on how the oil and plastics industries “deceived the public for decades and caused the plastic waste crisis.”
Plastics are part of a sector known as “petrochemicals,” or products made from fossil fuels such as oil and gas. More than 99% of plastics are produced from fossil fuels. There are “thousands of different types of plastic, each with its own chemical composition and characteristics.” The vast majority of these plastics cannot be “recycled”—meaning they cannot be collected, processed, and remanufactured into new products. As of 2021, the U.S. recycling rate for plastic is estimated to be only 5-6%. Despite decades of industry promises, plastic recycling has failed to become a reality due to long-known technical and economic limitations.
I have been doing my part for recycling plastics even though I have known for a long time what a wasteful activity that is. In this post in 2015, I wrote: Over the years, I have been convinced that even the recycling that I do is more for my own feel-good benefits than for anything else. In this blog post in 2018, I quoted a line that I came across in a reading: “Recycling plastic is to saving the Earth what hammering a nail is to halting a falling skyscraper.”
The Center for Climate Integrity’s report doesn’t use euphemisms:
For decades, petrochemical companies and the plastics industry have known of the technical and economic limitations that make plastics unrecyclable and have failed to overcome them. Despite this knowledge, the plastics industry has continued to increase plastic production, while carrying out a well-coordinated campaign to deceive consumers, policymakers, and regulators about plastic recycling.
So, we have plastic bags. Plastic clam shells. Plastic packaging in all colors and shapes even at the fresh produce wing of grocery stores. What can we do about them?
The NYT has this interesting statistic:
A Swiss study in 2021 showed that each rotting cucumber thrown away has the equivalent environmental impact of 93 plastic cucumber wrappers.
So, now are you worried more about plastic waste or about food waste?
Discarded produce that goes into landfills “creates almost 60 percent of landfill methane emissions, according to a 2023 report by the Environmental Protection Agency.”
Food is the most common material in landfills. The average American family of four spends $1,500 each year on food that ends up uneaten. Of that, fruits and vegetables make up nearly half of all household food waste, according to research from Michigan State University. And it’s not just the wasted food that adds to climate change. The farming and transportation wasted to produce food that is discarded impacts the climate, too.
If there is a best way out, what would it be?
The ideal solution, he said, would be to go back to the days before plastic, when grocers stacked their produce by hand and no one demanded that seasonal fruit like blueberries be available year-round.
Like at the vegetable shop in Chennai.
We are stuck, aren’t we? I mean, we know well that the ideal solution is simply not possible, right?
I argue over and over in my blogging that consumption is the problem. Consumption in many forms: From the huge mansions in which we live or want to live, the huge and many cars that we own or want to own, the clothes that we buy, the electronic gadgets that we accumulate, the grapes that we want to have when not in season, …
We can choose to be selective and merely point fingers at plastic straws and plastic bags that litter beautiful waterways, or criticize somebody else’s palatial homes where only two people live, or whatever. We might think that buying plastic-wrapped English cucumber is the problem because of the plastic wrapper that will end up in the trash can, but how many unwrapped cucumbers are being bought and never eaten, which then end up in landfills only to produce methane that is far worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas?
It is the total consumption that matters.
I like to imagine every human being allocated an amount of carbon to consume. If people want to spend their allocation on clothes, more power to them. But that will mean that they will have less carbon to spend on something else. I might spend a lot of my allocation to fly to India but then my carbon consumption elsewhere ought to be minimal.
So, sure, recycle all the plastic you can, even though most might end up in a landfill or incinerated. But, keep thinking about your personal carbon consumption. What are you doing to reduce your total carbon consumption?