Hub and Spoke vs Peer to Peer
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 06.28.07
In Britain, Prince Charles and his Highgrove Farms have been dropped by Sainsbury's grocery store, along with carrots from Patrick Holden, the Director of the Soil Association. Reason: Sainsbury is trying to go local, yet all of their food has to go to a central warehouse for distribution to the various stores.
According to the Guardian, Mr. Holden and the prince had been forced to truck their vegetables hundreds of miles from their farms to a centralised packhouse in East Anglia before they were sent back to be sold in Sainsbury’s stores local to their area. Mr Holden believes his vegetables were of the highest quality when harvested, but the combined effects of long-distance transport, handling to create large enough batches for the machines that wash and polish the vegetables and further storing after processing to create large enough batches for packing left the vegetables damaged and prone to rot.
"Supermarkets are preaching localism but it's just tokenism, their systems are still going in the opposite direction, and it's disastrous."It is great that the supermarkets are making overtures to local food, but the system isn't set up for it, they have big hub-and-spoke centralized distribution centers that might work for FEDEX but don't for vegetables. If you want local food, go to the farmers market and look them in the eye, peer to peer. The hub and spoke guys will never make it work. ::Guardian
Wasn't there recently a Welsh study linked from Treehugger that showed transport to market represented only 2% of the total energy expenditure in the production of food? I love looking for my local farmer's market (which is hard to get where I live, let me tell you), but in chasing local vegetables, how much are we genuinely saving?
What's desperately needed now is genuine energy accounting. Until we have that, we're swatting at ghosts.