Tuesday 13 February 2007

i don't know what to do

I was reading the Observer last night (yes I know it came out on Sunday - sometimes I'm a slow reader) and now I'm all confused.
I try to be an ethical buyer; I do my best to look after the environment; I tend to walk on my tiptoes when it comes to carbon footprints... but I find it very hard to know what is the right thing to do.

The Observer magazine ran an item on orange juice. I like orange juice. Fresh orange juice though, not that sweetened dilutable stuff. But just what is the most ethical way to buy your juice?

In the photo you can see Carl Pescosolido (a man ahead of his time in fruit efficiency terms)standing in a pile of thousands of rotting oranges somewhere in California. Such waste makes me despair but there are other ethical challenges I'm struggling with. Oranges tend to come from either Spain or Florida - so it makes sense that I should buy European ones to reduce the airmiles. But I like the Tropicana style juice which comes from the States. The most efficient form for travel is pasturised pure orange made from concentrate. It can travel in its concentrated form thus minimising the effect of travel. Plus it has a longer life so can be shipped rather than flown. All good... except the actual pasturisation process uses a lot of energy so its environmentally harmful.
Okay, the thing to do then is to buy (unwrapped) Oranges (European of course) and juice them myself (using a manual juicer of course). I would have to make sure that the Oranges were ethical produced, maybe even organic (no nasty pesticide issues) and that they were shipped, not flown. Except the oranges come in their own natural wrapping. All that skin and pith that is thrown away at the juicing stage added to the bulk on route making the travel stage highly inefficient.

Ahhhhh! Somebody tell me what I should do. My head is slowly frying in fairtrade, non GM soya fat. I'm worried that I will never again drink juice without having nightmares. I need guidance. In the meantime I think I'll read the Josua Jackson interview instead.

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