On or around Thu, 27 Jul 2006 22:13:01 +0100, Simon Isaacs
<
[email protected]> enlightened us thusly:
>Had a wonderful case study at uni. Watched fresh fish being landed at
>Brixham in Devon, then it got transported to a fish market in London,
>the following day it came back to Newton Abbot to be processed and
>then sent to the depot (Bristol) before being transported back to
>Newton Abbot. Took nearly 700 miles for a piece of fish to go just 10
>miles down down the road......
we used to get similar answers at the organic food place in Lampeter. I
have personally loaded stuff onto the wagon to be taken to the co-op's RDC
in Highbridge, Soemrset, and have seen the same produce on the shelves in
the co-op in Lampeter.
However, silly as this sounds when you look at the fact that someone could
walk half a mile down the road with a trolley, you have to have the
distribution network. The most-silly bit in your example is the distance
from where the fish is caught to where it's processed. There's a good
argument for more processing, closer to the source, rather than centralised
processing. The distribution of product to the shops though isn't so
inefficient as such examples make it look: taking the example of the organic
veg, say: each supermarket takes a relatively small amount and this could
be carried on for example a ford fiesta van, rather as part of a pallet on a
38-tonner. But although this would be cheaper for one or two local
supermarkets, it doesn't scale well - if there are, for example, 100 Tesco
supermarkets and each sends its own ford fiesta to Lampeter (or wherever
they're now based) to fetch the organic veg that's 100 vans on the road -
the average MPG is going to be about 0.5...
similar arguments if you compare a transit carrying say 1.5 tons with a
38-tonner carrying say 19.5 tons - that's 13 transit-fulls - even if your
transit does 40 mpg (which they don't) that translates to about 3 mpg, and a
modern artic does at least 3 times that on the average. So having all the
stuff on one wagon makes sense.
>Happens all over the country, with regionalised distribution centres
>for the supermarkets, etc.
>
>We have now started to do our bit, growing all our own food and our
>own chickens. Tastes so much better as well......
That's a good solution where it can be done. however local grown produce
ain't gonna work in London, or Birmingham, or the Liverpool-Manchester area
or at least a dozen other major centres - too many people, not enough local
growing capacity.
What we can and should do is a good deal less shipping of food around the
world. Accept that in the winter, we can't have fresh strawberries and
suchlike, that some things have a season in which they're available. The
classic case I read recently is flowers - Roses flown in from Columbia,
greenery to go with 'em from Israel I think it was. Madness. I like pretty
flowers fine, but to fly tons of them round the world so they can be put in
a vase and then thrown away in a few days really is decadent.
--
Austin Shackles.
www.ddol-las.net my opinions are just that
"Quos deus vult perdere, prius dementat" Euripedes, quoted in
Boswell's "Johnson".
