Imagine salad and vegetables from your own kitchen garden picked just five minutes before serving - the flavours are wonderful. Potatoes for example that are in the pot within a few minutes and served within half an hour of harvesting. The reality is that potatoes are fairly easy to store for winter, obviously they won't be 'new' potatoes, but the fact is that 25% of our carbon emissions are due to food transport alone.Compare the Kitchen Garden with the way food is produced for UK Supermarkets below:
"For example, to get new potatoes into British supermarkets in winter we import them from Egypt. Not that surprising - after all they are going to need warmth and sunlight to grow. But here’s the incredible process ( from : http://www.growveg.com/growblogpost.aspx?id=123).
- Seed potatoes grown in Scotland are exported to Egypt
- The potatoes are often grown in desert sand, fed by huge sprinkler systems. Because the sand contains no nutrients, fertilizer must be mixed into the water that is sprayed onto them.
- Water is a scarce resource in the desert so they drill down over 350m below ground level to a huge water system under the Sahara, which will never be replenished. It takes a staggering 500 litres (880 pints) of water to produce just 1kg of potatoes (2.2lb).
- To protect the potatoes on their journey to the supermarket and to retain moisture they are packed with peat – which is bought in from Ireland!
- The potatoes then make a huge journey over 2 weeks by specially refrigerated container truck and ship to reach the supermarkets in the UK."
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