OT: Onions from Australia! WTF!

[mailbin]

I try to resist OT topics but had to vent after spotting that the onion I just chopped had been grown in Australia! It's hard to comprehend how it can make economic sense to ship an onion from Oz to UK, but it must do or it wouldn't happen. What's upsetting is that the environmental cost cannot have been taken into account. I suspect historians will look back with incredulity on this period (hard to define the start date) - unless we destroy ourselves first. I feel much better now ;-) A timely spur to get the veg plot into action.

[newshound]

ICBA to look it up now, but last time I did (some years ago) I was astonished at how low both shipping by container ship and air freight could be.

[Cursitor Doom]

It's probably those massive Chinese freighters that are making it so cheap to ship stuff around the world in the same way they seem to make

*everything* cheap. I'd like to know how long an onion keeps for in transit, though.

[Huge]

The environmental cost is likely negligible, unless it was air freighted.

[Robin]

Easily >6 months if cured and chilled. My brother manages 6 months or more from his allotment without having chilled storage.

[DerbyBorn]

[e-mail] wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Totally with you. I once complained to Sainsbury's tha tthe chicken in some of their ready meas came from Thailand. It got changed eventually.

[Huge]

The world is full of innumerates.

[Steve]

They multiply like wabbits.

[FMurtz]

Wots wrong with our onions ?

[Bob Eager]

We had onion soup for lunch. The onions had travelled ten yards from the garden.

[Jethro_uk]

Funnily enough (after watching "Captain Phillips") out of curiosity, I looked into how many containers a ship can carry, and how much it costs.

Headline is the largest ship on the water can carry 100,000 shipping containers (2-TEU ?) , and the cost of shipping is about $40/day ????)

either way, a shipping container *full* of small, high-value items (mobile phones) makes the shipping pennies per item.

As has been stated before, it's more expensive to move something from Dover to London, than from Kowlook (or wherever) to Dover ....

[Jethro_uk]

*someone* has to pick them ?

[Andrew]

Meat and butter used to travel from Oz and New Zealand without any problems before we joined the common market.

[Cursitor Doom]

An excellent point we all too frequently overlook: our membership of the EU has caused foodstuffs to perish earlier than they otherwise would.

[Retro Futurist ...]

You try taking an onion into Australia ........

[Cursitor Doom]

Or bullfrogs! (wonder if anyone will spot the cultural origin of that?) ;-)

[alan_m]

And someone has to pick them in Australia where you probably wouldn't be let in if you claimed you only job was going to be onion picking.

[Nick]

One of my nieces went to Oz.

She was unskilled but was let in on the condition that she spent 6 months on a farm doing menial work. She is still there years later.

[ARW]

Hopefully for a nice bit of horse meat.

All that whinging and complaining when we had horse lasagne.

No one actually complained at the time that they were eating a horse. The complaints only started after they were told they had eaten a horse.

If it's got four legs and you can chop it into something small enough to fit the in oven then so what?

[Andy Burns]

probably once they found some cheaper chicken elsewhere.