Oh man, it has been a couple of weeks. This is where I normally apologize for being late, but I’m going to skip that. We can all agree that life happens, right?
So, tea blog. Let me get back into the right headspace. What do you want to know? I feel as though I’ve covered a lot, but also not very much. Maybe return to a topic I already covered?
Not yet, I’m going to tell you about how we decide where to source our ingredients from. Maybe I’ve touched on this in the past, but I’m feeling like I can expound further.
Let’s start with the simplest question to ask when choosing a supplier. Is it local?
We believe strongly that our dried produce is of the utmost quality because it didn’t need to travel thousands of miles to reach us, or it wasn’t produced in a greenhouse, and the money we spend purchasing the goods will remain in the pockets of our community members. Let’s unpack that so you can see why it is important to know where your food comes from.
The commercial growing process is great at producing large amounts of food and it should be noted that these practices are a large part in how we are able to produce 4 million metric tons across the globe annually. This is no small feat, but where I am critical of our modern food system is that the food is not equally distributed and in our country nearly 40% of all food grown is wasted. Don’t beat yourself up about the banana you let rot on your counter or the lunch meat you didn’t consume before it soured. Our household waste is miniscule in comparison to the amount of waste generated by modern packing, shipping, and sales tactics. We are spoiled walking into a grocery store and seeing all of our potential purchases splayed out in merchandisers and displays. The colors, sights, and smells are honestly a rush for your senses and the whole experience has a sort of magical quality to it. That being said, are you familiar with HACCP? It is a management system designed around food safety, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points. Fun, right? Working in school cafeterias and restaurants, you become familiar with the acronym. It is good to be safe, but when you add this layer of bureaucracy into the mix, we are now legally required to throw certain foods away. I’m not talking about a moldy piece of fruit–pitch it. I’m talking about when you go to check out at the grocery store and decide that maybe you didn’t want the ground beef you picked up earlier. Legally, that beef needs to be thrown away instead of being returned to the cooler. There is no way to know how long you had it in your cart which placed the meat at an unsafe temperature for too long. It is sound logic, but now we have to throw away perfectly good beef. HACCP is applied to every single item you can purchase, because large systems create variables at a larger scale and accidents that can affect hundreds of thousands of people should be avoided. My solution, stay small.
Now, let’s talk about transporting produce. If you pick a ripe peach in Georgia, it will be rotten by the time it arrives at our stores in Michigan. What’s the work around? Pick it early! If we pick the fruit before it is at its peak ripeness, then we will have an extra week or two to deliver all over the country. I hope this helps explain why your pineapples are either too green or soft and mushy. Again, HACCP governs the transportation and storage of produce. So we need refrigerated trucks and packagers, truck drivers, barge captains, and airline pilots all alike to supply our grocery stores with food. Did you know that up to 15% of food waste comes from the transporting of food? Boxes fall, there are bumps in the road, and refrigeration units fail in summer months. That goes without mentioning any pests that get in and contaminate produce along the way. Clever people have found ways to reduce the impact of transportation by improving packaging but it also increased the waste that is inherited by the consumer in order to transport the goods. So, more trash for us to throw away in order to benefit the system. I will happily go down the road to Harrietta, MI and pick some blueberries from Blueberry Hill when they are ripe and in season. That way the only berries we lose are the ones that I eat before we make it home.
Lastly, greenhouses. Don’t think that I’m about to go on some anti-greenhouse tirade and condemning the use and construction of the buildings. We live in a USDA hardiness zone 5a/5b (which has gone up since 2012) and having a greenhouse will allow you to begin the growing season in late March/April instead of near the end of May. It can make a huge difference in total yield for the season and I won’t besmirch these practices. Now, I will slightly smirch the practice of growing food from start to finish in a sterile, closed off system. Every good grower knows that flavor comes from the air and the soil. Our soil is slightly acidic and we have abundant wind from the lakes wafting over our county all year long. These elements create the chemical makeup of the fruits and vegetables and compose the flavor profile. If you want to see how in depth this can get, take a look at wine and grape growers. There is no lack of scholarly study on the matter. Which brings me to my issue. If produce is grown from start to finish in an industrial greenhouse, it won’t have the same depth of flavor as the ingredients we source locally. It’s that simple.
So, I suppose I’ve given you plenty to digest. Our modern world is fascinating and we’ve been able to achieve great feats of engineering and industry, but at the cost of quality of goods and the strength of our community. We would rather spend our money at local farms and on local goods. By doing so we skip the big box stores and get to support small local businesses. That way, when you purchase a bag of tea from ToadStone Dried Goods you know that we are using you money to take small step towards more sustainable food systems.