IDK where people got this idea that overseas shipping is particularly bad for the environment, but it takes less carbon to ship a small container of peaches across the Pacific Ocean than it does for you to drive your car to the grocery store to pick it up. Do you have any idea how many containers of peaches you can fit on a single cargo ship?
Of all the critical commentaries one could make about this image, “cargo ships will be the death of us” is the least accurate
How food is made is almost universally more important than where it’s made. Growing a shit ton of pears very efficiently in Argentina and then packaging that shit ton of pears very efficiently in Thailand is absolutely lower-carbon than growing and packaging them inefficiently, in small batches, in every town/city/region that wants packaged pears.
I mean, the word efficiency is obscuring a lot here, Thailand is not a centre for a high tech ultra productive packaging industry. It does have a large population and extremely weak labor laws which means it is a pool of cheap labor.
Shipping things, especially perishable and delicate fruit, needs preservation technology and is slightly more complicated than just put it in the container. Doing this thrice, which significantly delays the whole supply chain and introduces more complex modes of failure in this case only makes sense in a world where there is extreme global inequality, so the “costs” are marginal compared to the benefits of exploiting third world workers.
Sure, it is probably not that bad for the environment to ship around the world, but this is not being done this way due to some kind of natural allocation of efficiency.
