53. What is Convenience?
I’m going to say some things about your favorite meal subscription service in the following paragraphs that you might consider disparaging. Please continue reading at your own risk.
As a solo farmer, I listen to a healthy helping of podcasts throughout my work day. And of course that means I find myself listening to a lot of ads, and one I heard this week caught my ear. It was an ad for Blue Apron, (the online service, not the restaurant in Salem. In fact, I have nothing but good things to say about the Blue Apron and Red Rooster) which listed among its selling points that Blue Apron meals have a “smaller carbon footprint” than grocery store-sourced meals. I felt my eyebrow raise, and I’ve been pondering this a bit for the last few days.
I found this article written last year on the NPR website which backs up Blue Apron’s claims of sustainability. The source on the article is a study performed by the University of Michigan which claims the average grocery store meal produces 33% more greenhouse emissions than an equivalent meal from Blue Apron. The greenhouse savings is mostly attributed to reducing food waste and a streamlined supply chain.
People look at the plastic and cardboard involved with these services and see it as an eyesore. I have conversations with people all the time about the use of plastic in my operation and I wish I could use less. The bottom line is that fresh ingredients need secure packaging to remain fresh, and I can’t imagine how much more difficult this becomes when the food is in a cardboard box for 3+ days before it gets to you. So I’m going to leave the plastic part of this study alone and move on to more interesting stuff.
As part of the study, researchers duplicated Blue Apron recipes with store bought ingredients. “But store meals required purchasing food in larger quantities than necessary (think a 12-pack of hamburger buns for a two-person meal). The researchers took these leftovers and estimated how much would eventually be wasted, based on USDA data about consumer habits.” I think that rather than accepting wasteful consumer habits, perhaps we should work to correct these behaviors. Do these people not have freezers for those extra 10 hamburger buns!?
I see food waste through a very interesting lens as a gardener-turned-farmer. As a gardener, every edible morsel is cherished, and no carrot is too small to wash. But the larger my operation becomes, the more “food waste” I have to begin to accept. There are gradations of food waste, though. When the buggy outer leaves of a cabbage are dropped on a bed in the garden to cover the soil until the next planting, I hardly count that as waste. And it’s completely different than a cucumber that turns to mush in the crisper because I forgot about it.
Getting a handle on food waste requires a real paradigm shift. It’s something Chloe and I have started to recognize in the three weeks we’ve been on this Locavore diet. Instead of making a list of the meals we want to eat for the week and making an epic Sunday morning grocery shop, we’ve been working backwards. We start with the ingredients we have or have easy access to, think of the meals that can be made with them and we keep using them until they’re gone. As I said in a previous blog, variety in our diets is a privilege that we should try to recognize more deliberately. For us, eating leftovers for lunch the next day hasn’t been so bad.
With regard to the carbon emitted by trucks in order to get your meal kit to your door, this study suggests that because mountains of other packages are sharing the burden on the gas tank, these food deliveries are better for the environment. Sure, but I’m not prepared to give these subscription services credit for latching on to an already-bloated and over-used system. Amazon alone ships over 1.5 million packages per day, and I can’t help but wonder how many of them are goods that the customer could have picked up on the way home from work, or on a stroll down the street to a bodega.
Is continuing to have a long-distance relationship with our food system really sustainable? Are people really learning anything about cuisine or nutrition when the ingredients show up on their doorstep pre-chopped and wrapped in heaps of plastic?
There’s an assumption buried in this study that I fundamentally disagree with, and it has to do with convenience. Hello Fresh is more sustainable than the grocery store IF WE ASSUME that Americans value convenience over everything. We continue to kick so many proverbial cans down the road with this approach. When are we going to begin assessing the true cost of not knowing where our food came from or what’s in it? Or the drain on our local economies that occurs when we buy our sustenance from multinational corporations instead of supporting producers in our neighborhoods? And what about the skills and knowledge around producing and preparing food that we could lose forever if we don’t keep them alive?
Hello Fresh and Blue Apron provide delicious meals, I’m sure. But their chief advantage over other ways to feed yourself is the convenience. When they try to lean on nutrition, freshness, or sustainability as reasons you should buy their products, it feels like disingenuous pandering.
What bothers me the most about this study, the analysis, and therefore this ad that interrupted my podcast is all the profound possibilities of local food economies that they are looking past on the way to this conclusion. You know what’s the least carbon emissive way to eat your food? By producing, buying and preparing with local ingredients, of course! Using the UPS guy instead of an SUV to complete the last mile to your mouth just doesn’t create enough of a difference in my opinion that it’s worth celebrating.
Rant over.