Food miles. Scots scampi go to Thailand and back for processing.
19 December 2007 BBC Scampi caught in Scotland are carried 17,000 miles for shelling by hand in Bangkok then back to sell in Scotland. In the past the scampi was shelled by machine in Scotland. Now it is taken first to container ports like Grangemouth and loaded into containers, which are in effect giant freezers. They are shipped to Rotterdam before being loaded onto a huge container ship alongside around 7,000 other containers for the long haul to Bangkok. The key part of the process takes place in Thailand, as the langoustine are peeled by hand – the way consumer research says we like our scampi. The long journey home from Bangkok takes the frozen, peeled langoustine through Rotterdam again before a short hop across the North Sea to Grimsby, where the scampi is breaded – and then delivered to our supermarkets and our plates. The whole round-trip is about 17,000 miles (27,353km). So how can this make sense? This doesn’t make any sort of sense at all says Willie Mackenzie, Greenpeace. The company submitted research to the independent Carbon Trust. The conclusion was that shipping scampi to and from Thailand is no more environmentally damaging than peeling it by machine in this country. Mike Parker, deputy CEO of Young’s, says the science is on their side. “What they found was that there was no difference between the two and the reason for that is simply that by moving from machine processing here in the UK to hand processing in Thailand saves a lot of energy and obviously a lot of the CO2 emissions associated with that.
Go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7150834.stm
Madness either way – so should we shell our own scampi or change our eating habits?