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Feeding Remote Places: When the Last Food Mile is the Middle of Nowhere

by Cory Leahy | Sep 5, 2017 | Feature, Issue 2, Stories

Provisioning the dwellers of far-flung places puts all the elements of the food supply chain on display — from production and distribution to preparation and consumption. But how do they actually get it there?

When the unmanned SpaceX Falcon blew up en route to the International Space Station (ISS) in June 2015, 4,000 pounds of food were lost. It was the third consecutive attempt to bring food to the orbiting astronauts that failed. The astronauts — though not in imminent danger — were left hanging.

Although there have been some preliminary, and successful, attempts to grow salad greens in the space station, the astronauts on board remain dependent on rations from earth. Luckily for them, subsequent vessels reached the space station in time to spare them a lettuce diet.

The ISS epitomizes the cliche, “So close, yet so far.” Its orbit is only 249 miles above the earth, but those are some problematic miles to cross. One can imagine the astronauts hovering above the earth, recognizing familiar cities and gazing toward the spot where they know an In-n-Out Burger to be.

And while the ISS is remote, there are many places on earth that are even trickier to get to, with situations that require similarly complex logistics. When feeding the dwellers of far-flung places, all the elements of the food supply chain are on display, including production, distribution, preparation and consumption. How the resulting waste is managed is also a reflection of how far away from home one is. At a certain point, that waste become less of a burden and more of a necessity.

After months of technical setbacks, the unmanned Falcon 9 Space X Rocket, with its Dragon Cargo Ship, delivered 2.5 tons of supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) in April 2014. It was the first time a private company used its own rocket on a resupply mission. Image: courtesy NASA.gov.

The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, left, performs a replenishment at sea with the Military Sealift Command fast combat support ship USNS Arctic and the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jay C. Pugh

Floating City

The U.S. Navy’s 10 Nimitz class aircraft carriers are the largest ships in the world. Nearly a quarter mile in length, these vessels are like floating cities, with many of the amenities of home, including a variety of foods. Unlike oil-powered ships of similar size that need to refuel every three days, the nuclear-powered Nimitz ships can cruise at 55 mph for 20 years straight — about 10 million miles — on a single “tank” of nuclear fuel.

But while the ship’s engines aren’t in danger of going hungry, the 6,000 hard-working sailors on board will eat through 25 pallets worth of food a day — roughly what an average family eats in five years. The ship’s pantries can store more than 60 days’ worth of dried food and 30 days’ worth of frozen, but only approximately two weeks’ worth of fresh fruits and vegetables. Bringing these massive ships to port every 14 days during a seven- to nine-month deployment is neither convenient nor strategic. Instead, the carriers can remain in position thanks to a maneuver known as Replenishment at Sea.

The procedure has the look of an elaborate mating ritual between two ships. They move forward on parallel courses, about 150 feet apart. Sailors on the carrier fire rifles loaded with weighted slugs at the replenishment ship. The slugs trail thin lines to which progressively heavier cables are attached and pulled across the chasm, until cables large enough to be winched connect both forward-moving ships. Eventually, the cables are hooked up to hydraulic rigs and tensioned to several thousand pounds of pressure, and mini cable cars ferry pallets of food (and other goods) between the two ships.

To speed things up, helicopters ferry pallets directly to the carrier’s flight deck, where forklifts are waiting to bring them into the bowels of the ship’s warehouse-sized pantries. Other cables strung between the two ships function as zip lines across the chasm, on which more loads of food travel. As the supplies are loaded, fuel lines are also stretched across, because fighter jets have to eat, too.

For an in-depth look at life on an aircraft carrier, check out the PBS series “Carrier.”

USS Ross receives pallets of supplies from USS John Lenthall during a replenishment-at-sea. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Robert S. Price.

Sailors heave a line during an underway replenishment aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS William P. Lawrence.

Sailors on the USS Blue Ridge look on as a refueling boom crosses over the South China Sea.

USS Ross receives supplies during a replenishment-at-sea with USS John Lenthall. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Robert S. Price

U.S. Sailors prepare to transport pallets during a replenishment at sea aboard the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman.

Sailors and Marines pass boxes in the hangar bay aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge during a replenishment-at-sea with the fast combat support ship USNS Arctic and the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge. U.S. Navy Photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Kaleb R. Staples

Meanwhile, waste from the floating city is offloaded to the replenishment vessel. Waste plastic, which has been compressed into discs, will be returned to port and disposed of according to local law. Paper products are burned in filtered incinerators. Food waste goes overboard, presumably to the delight of local fish. When far from shore, human waste feeds the fish too.

The basic configuration of cables binding two moving ships was designed by Lt. Chester Nimitz himself—for whom the world’s largest aircraft carriers are named—during World War I. Stationed 300 miles south of Greenland on the replenishment vessel USS Maumee, Nimitz tweaked and refined his system while refueling and replenishing 34 destroyers in difficult conditions during the spring of 1917. Now, as then, time is of the essence in this drill, as both ships are vulnerable to attack when they are intertwined. And accidents happen.

“Any time you put a 95,000-ton aircraft carrier next to a 50,000-ton replenishment vessel in heavy seas, tied together, sometimes King Neptune will reach up and knock things off the line and into the water,” says retired U.S. Navy Captain Dan Grieco. In Grieco’s 30-year career he’s seen only two items lost during replenishment, including an aircraft part, which they recovered after hastily suspending the replenishment and beginning a search operation.

While the replenishment operation itself is a well-oiled machine, its success depends on finding the time to conduct it. During operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, Grieco says, they couldn’t replenish as often as they wanted, and it wasn’t good. “We were down to drinking boxed milk at times,” he says.

Further Afield

The difficulties involved in feeding an aircraft carrier full of sailors are rooted in the sheer quantities of food and in the windows of vulnerability that open when the food is handed off. But for those who overwinter on Antarctic bases, the challenge is reversed. The number of mouths are fewer, but the intervals between replenishments are considerably longer. And getting there, especially in winter, can be more dangerous than an off-planet jaunt to the space station. In fact, winter travel is so dangerous that even medical evacuations from Antarctica are extremely rare. Winter residents of Antarctica are generally stuck with what ails them until winter breaks. And the same goes for what nourishes them.

On the shifting surface of the Brunt Ice Shelf, on the coast of Antarctica, the British-run Halley VI research station was built on skis to stay atop the ice—something its five predecessors failed to accomplish. And while the Nimitz carriers wait two weeks between replenishments, and the ISS is paid a visit every 40 or so days, Halley IV gets only two visits per year, courtesy of the British icebreakers Shackleton and Ross.

The first visit of the summer season lands just before Christmas, when a seasonal crew of about 100 people arrives. The Antarctic summer doesn’t linger long, and before you know it a ship is back in February to take the snowbirds home. Those two visits constitute the only opportunities for replenishment that the base sees for an entire year. The crew of 11 that overwinters for nearly 10 months must make that food last until the following December atop the hungry ice.

The pantry at Halley VI is stocked with canned supplies and staples that must last through the winter for a crew of 11 to 16. Once the February shipment comes and goes, the pantry won’t be restocked until the following December.

The Christmas arrival delivers a summer stash of fresh veggies, but its main non-human cargo is a year’s supply of frozen and canned goods. The February delivery brings almost exclusively fresh veggies, explains John Eager, a former chef at the base who now does kitchen and meal planning from Halley’s administrative headquarters in the United Kingdom. The nature of the fresh vegetables tends to be along the lines of what you might find in a homesteader’s root cellar.

Halley VI is located on the Brunt Ice Shelf, a mass of ice floating on the Weddell Sea in Antarctica.

BUTTERNUT SQUASH AND FETA CHEESE TARTLETS

Take squash that’s just past fresh, roast and freeze it to make this fresh-tasting dish in the depths of the Antarctic winter. The tartlets make a great starter with reduced balsamic vinegar during the 105 days of darkness at Halley.

3 tbsp. olive oil
600 grams squash, peeled and diced
375 grams puff pastry
150 grams feta cheese
1 red chili, deseeded and finely chopped
2 tsp. thyme leaves
Salt and black pepper, freshly ground
2 baking trays, one lined with Teflon sheet

Set the oven to 400°F. Heat a baking tray with 1 tablespoon oil on it. Add the diced squash and roast for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until softened. Meanwhile, roll out the pastry and cut into 6 equal pieces. Put them on the Teflon-lined baking sheet. Mark a thin border around each one. Chill for 30 minutes.

Divide the cooked squash and place it on the pastry squares, inside the borders. Crumble cheese over top, then sprinkle with chili and thyme. Season and drizzle with the rest of the oil. Bake for 30 minutes, until golden and cooked through. Serve hot, with reduced balsamic vinegar dressing.

“We stick to hard, dense stuff that lasts a lot longer. Potatoes, carrots, onions, squash, turnips,” Eager says. “They store incredibly well, as the atmosphere is very dry. Eggs keep well, too. We can make them last six months by turning them over every week.”

Because it can take several weeks for the icebreakers to make their way to the station, anything more perishable might not even survive the journey to Antarctica, much less stick around through the winter. “Anything like salad is in a sorry state by the time it gets there,” Eager says.

Frozen foods, meanwhile, are in their element on the frozen continent. While the base itself endeavors to stay atop the ice, most of the frozen goods are buried about 10 feet down — which makes more sense than using electricity to power a freezer.

As veggies like squash approach their expiration dates, the cook will make them last longer by preparing finished dishes and freezing them. Many holiday meals are prepared and frozen months ahead of time.

Waste in Antarctica is carefully dealt with, in accordance to the Protocol for Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1991. Solid waste is sent home for incineration, while sewage and greywater are treated on site so that minimal trace is left behind.

Waste may be a liability in Antarctica, with massive effort and expense invested in its disposal. But when you get further away than the end of the Earth, waste suddenly becomes too valuable to part with.

Waste as Fuel

Any journey beyond the moon would reach the limits of the earthly supply chain. It’s not that food couldn’t be brought along; it’s just that replenishments can’t be counted on. If you don’t come back soon you will run out of food — unless you produce your own.

NASA hopes to complete a two-year mission to Mars by the 2030s. SpaceX hopes to get there a decade sooner. The present, consequently, is a fertile time for research into how to feed astronauts aboard space ships and on different planets. Because a growing portion of space exploration is being conducted by private enterprises, much of the research is closely guarded as trade secrets. But the studies being done in the public sphere are enough to shed light on how the space-age food scene could look.

For long-haul journeys through space, and for colonizing Mars, the primary means of food transport will be in the form of information, including knowledge about how to grow plants in space and in alien environments. And no information is more valuable, and less replaceable, than the DNA of seeds. These genetic blueprints are the primary way humans could transport food to places that are too far away to be replenished or to bring sufficient supplies. In the case of the two-year journey to Mars, it may be possible to pack enough calories to keep the astronauts alive. But growing edible plants on board the spacecraft would likely be vital to survival for other reasons entirely.

As plants grow, they remove carbon dioxide from the air and replace it with oxygen. On the long flight to Mars, this action would purify the air on board. Meanwhile, the sequestration of that atmospheric carbon, in the form of plants, would take care of the astronauts’ waste.

The interconnectedness of food, oxygen and waste disposal has led to a focus on closed-loop systems in research laboratories. In one study, rats are being kept alive with oxygen produced by algae. Depending on oxygen levels in the rats’ enclosure and the rats’ metabolic requirements, scientists can shine light on the the algae to trigger photosynthesis, the process by which plants consume carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. This is a simplified version of how astronauts and their food production systems could help regulate their shared atmosphere.

Any food grown in such a system could be considered a byproduct of the processes of waste management and atmospheric purification. The astronauts would have to do their part in the cycle by eating the food and excreting the waste products therefrom. As the astronauts would be eating much more than what they grow, thanks to the food they brought with them, the volume of their waste would likely exceed what they need for their little garden. But that extra poop would not be jettisoned. You don’t throw away gold.

While some researchers are studying the biospheres of space travel, others are looking into how food could be produced when and where the spaceship lands. Dutch scientists are attempting to grow crops like tomatoes, peas and wheat in red earth, dug from a Hawaiian volcano, thought to closely resemble Martian soil. According to Wieger Wamelink, an ecology researcher at Wageningen University, it took a little tweaking and some animal refuse, but plants eventually began growing quite well in the red dirt, which was purchased from NASA. On Mars, he explains, the plants will similarly have some extra help.

“The feces of the astronauts [produced] during the travel have to be stored and brought to Mars, where it can be used as fertilizer,” Wamelink explains.

Hundreds of thousands of seed samples from around the world are saved at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in arctic Norway.

SEED DATA

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in arctic Norway has been nicknamed the “Doomsday Vault” because its location and construction were designed to withstand a variety of manmade and natural disasters. North enough to withstand rising temperatures, high enough to avoid tsunamis and rising sea levels, remote enough to survive a nuclear war and deep enough in a mountain to withstand meteorites, bombs and tornadoes, Svalbard has as good a chance as any place on earth of surviving the big one.

While Svalbard is often referred to as a seed bank, it technically isn’t, as no regeneration of seed takes place on site. “We built a tunnel in a frozen mountain and put seeds in it,” explains Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which funded Svalbard’s construction and now covers its operating costs.

Humble remarks aside, Svalbard is no joke. The vault holds copies of seed collections from seed banks around the world, including ancient strains of wheat, lentil and chickpea from Aleppo’s imperiled seed collection. Every time a depositor seed bank regenerates any of its seed, they update Svalbard’s collection, which currently contains 860,000 varieties.

Future astronauts may grow some of their meals inside greenhouses, such as this Martian growth chamber, where fruits and vegetables could be grown hydroponically, without soil. Image: by Pat Rawlings, courtesy NASA SAIC.

Sowing nitrogen-binding plants like clovers, lupine, green bean and pea is another vital step in the process, according to the Dutch scientists. “Together with nitrogen-fixing bacteria they can take nitrogen gas from the air and turn that into eventually nitrate, which the plants can use for growth,” says Wamelink.

Obviously, growing food in actual Martian soil could present a host of obstacles. The food would have to be grown in some kind of space greenhouse that would be pressurized to Earth’s atmospheric pressure. It would need to be heated, lit and protected from cosmic radiation, which damages plant DNA. Perhaps it could be partially buried, with electric lights at night, powered by solar panels. The first colonists to arrive on Mars will have no shortage of work to keep them busy, as they attempt to construct a real-life biosphere experiment—not in the red sands of Arizona, but on the red planet itself.

Despite the challenges of feeding people in remote places, humans continue to push the limits of their range. When the distance from home reaches the point where growing food is more practical than bringing it, the journey from “farm” to table resets. Space travelers millions of miles from home, counterintuitively, will be eating more locally than the person on Earth who shops at his or her local grocery store. And in the closed-loop systems where plants and humans thrive on each other’s waste, some basic facts underlying the Earth’s ecosystems become crystal clear, even as our home planet fades in the rearview mirror. Food and waste are different sides of the same coin, part of an endless cycle.

If you were embarking on a two-year trip to Mars, what foods would you be sure to take? Tweet us. #FeedingMars

The Early Years of Logistics

by Cory Leahy | Sep 5, 2017 | History, Issue 2, Stories

We increasingly want more information about our food. We want to see, at least once, the faces of those who bring food from fields to plates. The farther we’ve gotten from the farm, the more important transparency has become. To better understand a system that is largely invisible, we need an introduction to food logistics. History is a good place to begin.

Ever find yourself behind a double-parked truck? Most likely, it’s delivering food. Trucks covered with images of pizza or a cornucopia of vegetables make their way into the hearts of cities around the world daily, and we hardly take note — except when they block our way to work. But truckers aren’t the only ones who dispatch our daily food supply. Container ships, cargo planes, bicyclists, camels and trains all conjoin in one complex global supply chain.

Although the tracks of our food as it travels today are well hidden, the flow of the food supply chain has existed for millennia. Pack animals and olive-oil-bearing clay amphorae delivered food from source to consumption before the birth of Jesus. But logistics, the complex systems that optimize the flow of food, originated with Alexander the Great.

Read notes from Robyn’s book research.

FORAGE AS FUEL

The concept of logistics appeared far earlier than the word. The word first appeared in the late 19th century to mean the art of moving and maneuvering armies, including their supplies and food. The first logisticians — working long before the 1800s — had to consider the seasonality of fodder, food for transport animals, the lack of roads for wheeled transport and the scarcity of ports, storage facilities, depots and communication networks.

During the fourth century BC, the Greek king Alexander the Great assembled an empire that stretched from Asia to Africa. His success was largely due to his understanding of logistics, the strategic movement of men and weapons that factored in harvest calendars, geography and the need for single points of control.

Other military commanders improved on Alexander’s strategies for moving food and materiel. For them, having seamless logistics was a combat strategy. When Hannibal Barca, a Punic commander from Carthage, crossed the Alps in 218 BC, more than 30 elephants joined his army. The imminent snowfall would slow their progress and make it impossible to reach their enemies in Italy. The logistics of moving his army and the food to feed his troops was complicated enough. But the challenge of feeding the animals that transported the food proved impossible.

“The Elements of the Science of War” appeared in 1811, written by an engineer named Wilhelm Muller. He wrote about military campaigns going back to 1667, citing the importance of balancing troop movements with the need for “victuals” and forage.

While today we move food to cities on various forms of wheeled and non-wheeled transport networks, our networks run on fossil fuel, not forage. Early logisticians were faced with the vagaries of growing seasons, changeable weather and the limited availability of enough forage to keep their equine and elephantine transport on their feet and moving. While we struggle to keep food cold and extend shelf life, those early logisticians had much more to contend with. Like no roads.

On this amphora, you see Dionysus, the Greek god of the grape harvest and winemaking, drinking wine while satyrs make wine — an illustration of the journey from vine to cup.

Victuals

Food or provisions, typically as prepared for consumption.

EARLY HIGHWAYS

Roman roads are mentioned in nearly every tourist guidebook. The Romans developed complex procurement and distribution of food supplies, mostly because the republic and then the empire did not produce enough food locally to feed its growing urban populations. While the Assyrians and Greeks knew how to feed their soldiers, it wasn’t until the Romans developed a complex system of roads, taxation and administration that the idea of optimizing the movement of food took shape. Roman roads and bridges show us how they distributed food across the empire.

Centuries later, when Napoleon led his Grand Armée to conquer Russia in 1812, he drew upon Greek and Roman logistics to enable his troops to stay in the field longer, sustained by a ready supply of food while destroying the supplies of their enemies. But his march on Stalingrad wasn’t so successful. The Cossacks in his path resorted to destroying food supplies along the way. Napoleon’s rations and forage for his animals were soon depleted as the Russian winter closed in. In the end, Napoleon lost almost 400,000 troops. His defeat precipitated his fall from power and the unraveling of the Napoleonic Empire. Logistics proved to be his nemesis.

THE SCIENCE OF LOGISTICS

As the Industrial Revolution mechanized much of civilian society, Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced the concept of the scientific management of process manufacturing. He promoted practices that optimized the workflow while eliminating waste. These included standardizing parts and practices as well as carefully measuring and maximizing the use of time and labor. Taylorism, as his theory was called, led to further developments that looked at how to produce and move products from factory to consumer. Food production was one of many processes that became Taylorized.

The food supply chain differs from other supply chains in its requirement for careful temperature control. The development of ice manufacturing and refrigeration led to the development of what is now called the cold chain. Entrepreneurs such as Augustus Swift revolutionized the meat supply chain, utilizing refrigerated rail cars and vertically integrating all aspects of meat production.

Railroads began to move food across long distances beginning in the mid-19th century. Shipping containers, developed by Malcom McLean during the 1950s and 1960s, transformed how food moved on ships, trucks and railroads. The integration of these transport networks eventually became our international, intermodal food distribution network. When computers arrived during the early 1950s and 1960s, the idea of logical workflows got an extra push through the acceleration of data processing. The development of computer-based forecasting systems and materials requirements planning came next. It wasn’t until the 1980s, however, that supply chain management became a thing, leading to the emergence of supply chain departments and centers in academic institutions. And now, food logistics has its own professional organizations, conferences and publications.

Look for this historical narrative to go into hyperdrive as railroads, computers, tracking devices, drones and robots bring new speed, safety and personalization to our daily meal.

Process Manufacturing

The production of goods typically produced in bult quantities — as opposed to discrete and countable units — including chemicals, food and beverages, gasoline, paint and pharmaceuticals.

How the Bodega Gets the Banana

by Food+City | Jun 30, 2017 | Feature, Issue 1, Stories

Like most New York City bodegas, Brooklyn’s 6th Ave. Deli is a practical place.

The narrow aisles in the bodega — the Big Apple term of endearment for the independently run corner stores that trade in a little of everything — are stocked with a dizzying display of the humdrum goods that shop owners know will sell: batteries, king-sized Butterfingers, garbage bags, potato chips, Powerball tickets and, sitting on the floor by the sandwich counter, a 40-pound case of bananas.

Counterman Eddie Gvd, who is originally from Yemen, often runs the register dressed in a tidy white apron. He will sell each of these ubiquitous yellow fruits for between 20 and 35 cents, lowering the price the closer their color deepens to fully brown. Since 6th Ave. Deli usually pays $20 to $25 per case, around 100 pieces of fruit, those bananas bring in just pennies of profit.

Gvd may be able to double the store’s money on candy bars, but he treats bananas like a super-market’s milk and eggs — as a loss leader, an item priced at or near cost in order to bring in buyers for the $1 bottles of Poland Spring that cost the bodega just 17 cents.

Plus for Gvd, selling freckled loosies on the counter for a quarter is just the way the bodega banana business works. The fellow who delivers the bananas to Gvd and a handful of bodega owners pays maybe $16 to $17 per case to a wholesaler, who bought them for a dollar or two less, and so on down the chain. “At least six to seven make a living off it,” says Gvd. “Everybody makes money.”

Gvd’s math isn’t that far off, considering the three-week journey each banana makes to his store. It is a produce paradox that while bananas might seem like an all-American fruit—ubiquitous and inexpensive, they beat out apples, oranges, grapes and strawberries in per capita consumption, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — they always come from somewhere else, like most New Yorkers.

It requires a host of middlemen — growers, exporters, cargo ship operators, importers, trucking companies, wholesale produce sellers and delivery drivers — to bring bananas up from the humid plantations that flourish in the equatorial zones of Central and South America. They travel by cargo ship, through the Panama Canal if they’re coming from parts of Columbia or Ecuador, then up the Atlantic Ocean to industrial harbors like the Port Newark–Elizabeth Marine Terminal in New Jersey, the largest commercial dock on the East Coast.

Then, after a stint in humble storage centers and ripening rooms hidden in the industrial edges of the Bronx, New Jersey or Long Island, the bananas take their final ride through the city. The majority of them will travel in an army of plain white box trucks with hand-stenciled names like D&J Tropical Produce or D&B Deli Man. They drive from store to store and double-park while their drivers hand over cases of quickly expiring fruit to bodega clerks like Gvd — beloved brands like Chiquita and Dole, but also bunches with lesser-known names and perhaps lower price tags, like El Manaba, Bonita, Bello, Royal Gold and a recent upstart called Selvatica.

Remarkably, no one throws a ticker tape parade to announce the arrival of these exotic fruits, and within 24 hours, most bananas change hands — sold for just three for a dollar, or 79 cents a pound — for the final time.

ARE BODEGAS AT RISK?

The first bodegas were small groceries opened by Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, hence the use of the Spanish term bodega, which refers to a small grocery. Today, according to Jack Sagen of Jetro Cash & Carry, a food-service supply store that caters to bodegas, the owners are now primarily Dominican, Mexican and Arab. Recently, a dramatic increase in rents has led to a decrease in bodegas in upper Manhattan, according to the New York City-based Bodega Association of the United States, but for now, they still play a necessary role in many other city neighborhoods where other food options remain scarce. They are still widely considered one of the most iconic components of New York City life.

THE BUSINESS OF BANANAS

That the banana is a truly a modern agricultural marvel — remarkably affordable, fast-ripening, found in pristine condition for sale every day, everywhere, all year long — is a logistics miracle that has largely gone unnoticed by most New Yorkers.

Few are more aware of this complicated yet largely invisible process than Joe Palumbo. For the past four decades, Palumbo has been peddling produce, the first two delivering to markets and bodegas, the second running Top Banana, a wholesaler in the South Bronx that sells Dole, Del Monte, Chiquita and Bonita bananas, as well as Selvatica plantains and dozens of other fruits and vegetables. He bought the business from the Strik family in 1995: “I was a customer,” he says. “I used to tease them that I’d buy it…then one day they called me and said they were ready.”

Top Banana — whose motto is still “Strik-ly the best” and whose old-fashioned logo features a gorilla chasing after a banana that just lost its top hat — is a ripener, a required stop for every banana before it arrives at a bodega, fruit stand or grocery store. What Palumbo purchased from the Striks wasn’t their delivery routes, distribution network or a banana brand — the family didn’t own any of those — but their warren of refrigeration rooms.

Bananas we buy in the United States are nearly all a resilient monocropped cultivar called the Cavendish. Multinational corporations grow this sturdy species on large plantations in tropical places like Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia and Ecuador. Even so, to get the bananas from there to here before they turn to mush, they must be picked bright green, bitter and hard. They are refrigerated during transport via shipping containers on cargo ships and then ripened only once they hit New York.

Though many varieties of bananas are cultivated for sale around the world — and many would argue that most are even better tasting than the Cavendish — the American export market is literally built around the breed because it withstands travel and, more importantly, is resistant to a disease that decimated the tastier Gros Michel cultivar in the 1950s.

Monoculture — where just one kind of plant is cultivated — makes the crop more susceptible to disease, but it also means the farming process is extremely efficient: Plants are the same height at harvest and they mature at the same rate, so fruits are all the same size when they’re separated into bunches and put into a box.

Under a seemingly endless canopy of Cavendish leaves, rubber-booted workers harvest the bunches by hand with machetes, removing enormous hanging stalks that each typically hold hundreds of bananas growing in semi-circular groups of 10 to 20 fruits. Together, they look like upside-down umbrellas. (The banana is actually a flowering plant, and its trunk is technically a stem. Botanically speaking, the banana fruit itself is one big berry.)

Growers like to refer to the groups as “hands” — the word banana is from an old Arabic term meaning “finger” — which are split up by plantation workers into what Americans fondly call bunches. Bunches are washed, tucked into a branded plastic bag perforated with holes to let in air and placed into a 40-pound cardboard case.

Fifty-four cases of bananas are loaded onto a pallet. Twenty pallets are forklifted into a refrigerated shipping container, and then those 40,000 pounds of bananas join hundreds more containers — loaded both with more bananas and some other exported goods — on a docked cargo ship readying for its journey to non-banana-growing countries.

All told, it takes just 18 to 21 days for those bananas to go from plantation to bodega, says Palumbo, a Brooklyn native who bears a faint resemblance to a young Rodney Dangerfield and shares his penchant for comedic delivery. That and his banana expertise have landed him recurring appearances on the “Produce Pete” segments on WNBC Channel 4 Television in New York, where he has talked about how to properly open a banana or use the inside of a banana peel to shine shoes.

THE BANANA’S TRIP FROM FARM TO BODEGA

the banana's trip from farm to bodega

One Con of Monoculture

Some who monitor the banana industry, and the recent outbreaks of a new strain of disease known as Race 4, worry that the Cavendish will soon join the Gros Michel in the annals of commercial extinction. Monoculture makes the crop more susceptible to pests or pathogens, which can easily be delivered via soil or on the clothes of a visitor. One suggested solution lies in polycropping of many banana breeds, an exciting thought for those seeking diverse banana flavors.

TOP: At Top Banana, a pulp thermometer measures the internal temperature of a box of bananas in one of the ripening rooms. ABOVE: In recent years, Top Banana built multi-story, high-tech, pressurized ripening rooms that allow for better ripening. The display shows room and fruit temperatures, ethylene and humidity levels.

an employee checks the i

An employee checks the inside of a banana for ripeness.

WAKING THE CHILDREN

A century ago, says Palumbo, bananas were brought in on the stalk and stored in “banana cellars.” Refrigeration revolutionized the business, as did the invention of the pallet and forklift. Until about 30 years ago, most ripening systems were refrigerated rooms with fans to circulate air around the bananas.

“Bananas are like children,” says Palumbo. “They have to be put to bed, and they have to be woken up.”

Waking the banana has become more technologically advanced over time, though temperature still provides the basic alarm clock. Today’s newest systems — Top Banana built four in the past few years, in addition to maintaining 12 older models — feature computer-controlled, multi-story, pressurized ripening rooms with built-in airflow. Each room can hold two-and-a-half containers worth of bananas at a time.

Not only is the ripening process more consistent — and designed to ripen tens of thousands of bananas in about a week — it is now possible to remotely track humidity, delivery of ethylene gas and airflow through the boxes. Like the bags, the boxes are punctuated with holes to aid the process. The crew even knows the temperature of the fruits themselves, thanks to pulp thermometers that are plunged into the flesh. “I can even see it on my phone if I have to,” says Dan Imwalle, who has worked for Top Banana for eight years.

Even so, the skill and experience of a professional ripener like Imwalle is important, notes Palumbo. “No load is the same,” he says of the refrigerated shipping containers that arrive at his loading bays directly from the ports. Each shipment has bananas at different stages of ripening, and his employees can quickly determine how quickly they are ripening and what the sales forecasts are from day to day. They’ll sort the containers based on how quickly or slowly they need to get the bananas where they need to go.

“Each morning I spend 20 minutes touching, feeling, looking,” says Imwalle. He usually wears custom Top Banana RefrigiWear jackets to keep him warm inside the ripening rooms, which typically hover somewhere between 56 and 67 degrees, depending on the season.

Like most ripeners, Imwalle thinks about a banana in roughly seven stages, which are helpfully listed on a color-coded guide put out by each brand. Though the color for each stage differs slightly for each brand of banana — a fact that both amuses and frustrates Palumbo — the ripeners get them at one (very green) and sell them to markets or distributors somewhere between three and five (when they have some green, but also some yellow). American customers usually eat bananas between a four and a seven, when they are sweeter, have more nutrients and are just beginning to freckle.

In New York City — where Africans, Jamaicans, Indians and others eat off-the-boat green bananas, and banana bread takes care of the brown ones — it’s fair to say that every color is desired by someone. Groceries and big markets buy bananas on the greener side, because they know boxes will sit around their basements and bunches will sit around in their customers’ kitchens. Bodegas usually buy bananas on the turn from green to yellow, because their customers will eat them right away. The overall goal for a ripener or wholesaler? Not to have too many or too few of the colors at any given time.

Musa banana variety

MUSA

One of two or three genera in the family Musaceae; it includes bananas and plantains. Around 70 species of Musa are known, with a broad variety of uses.

Beyond 4011

Most Americans typically eat only one type of musa — the botanical genus of bananas, including plantains. The commercially sold varieties are all hybridized, cultivated members — but around the world the fruit is cultivated and sold in many flavors and forms, some now centuries old. There is a chunky banana cultivar called Latundan that has a tart-apple flavor, and red-skinned bananas with pink flesh. For those lucky enough to live in banana-growing regions, you can also still find the original wild musa, some creamy and sweet, some largely inedible thanks to their tiny size and large seeds.

THE BEATING HEART OF THE NYC FOOD SYSTEM

Palumbo has plenty of colleagues in the ripening business, many of them with more ripening rooms. They include EXP Group, a New Jersey company that imports Latin American produce including many bodega-bound bananas; J. Esposito & Sons, a 60-year-old company from Brooklyn whose third generation of owners just built new ripening rooms on Long Island; Yell-O-Gold, located just outside of Boston; and Banana Distributors of New York, just around the corner from Top Banana. Each ripener also gets its bananas from various ports in the Northeast. Many of Top Banana’s brands come through the port in Wilmington, Delaware, for example, while J. Esposito & Sons gets its bananas at one of the few working ports in Brooklyn, ripens them in Long Island, then trucks them back to the city.

What makes Top Banana unique is that it is the only ripener in Hunts Point Produce Market, the city’s 48-year-old, 113-acre cooperatively owned commercial distribution center in the South Bronx. Surrounded by yards of battered, barbed-wire-topped fencing, the produce market is like a city unto itself, albeit one that looks like an Eastern European post-war public housing project. Cars have to pay $5 to a security guard at a flank of tollbooths to enter, unless the driver has a pass. The complex consists of four long, low-slung, rectangular buildings that are essentially a series of refrigerators and truck bays. The market has its own private rail yard and, from the wee hours of the morning until midday seven days a week, a vast parking lot bustling with fast-moving tractor trailers.

The produce market, as well as smaller dedicated markets for seafood and meat, make up New York City’s 329-acre Hunts Point Food Distribution Center, the beating heart of the city’s food system. The produce market’s website says it generates $2.4 billion annual in sales with 10,000 employees from 55 countries and 49 states. That’s why Banana Distributors of New York is just around the corner on Drake Street, along with companies like Arugula King, Mr. Hand Truck, Jetro Cash & Carry and also Big Farm Wholesale, which is one of many smaller produce resellers who will buy bananas from a ripener and re-sell them for maybe $14 a case, up or down a few dollars depending on how much quickly browning fruit they are sitting on.

BANANA RIPENESS CHART

Bananas are ranked in stages of ripeness from from 1 (very green) to 7 (with many brown spots). Distributors and bodegas buy them between 3 and 5 and most American consumers eat them between 4 and 7 when they are sweeter and have more nutrients.

From Sea to Table: The Logistics of Sushi

by Cory Leahy | Apr 28, 2016 | Food for Thought, Stories

These days serious locavores can enjoy an array of restaurants serving up regionally grown ingredients. But if you’ve got a hankering for sushi, not even proximity to an ocean will ensure that you’ll be dining on local fish. So how does all that fish get to us in time to safely eat raw?

Only a few decades ago sushi was considered an exotic cuisine, with many Americans afraid to try raw fish. Fast forward to 2016: Sushi restaurants are the norm across the country — even in most landlocked areas — and it’s not uncommon to see prepackaged sushi in the cold grocery cases, if not a dedicated chef on site making it to order.

The increase in interest has driven a rise in demand for getting fresh seafood from the sea to plate as quickly as possible. Fish, like humans, travels fastest by airplane if going a great distance. Throughout the country vendors like International Marine Products Inc., have hubs in coastal and landlocked cities, which provide those areas with daily shipments of fresh fish within hours of being caught and flash-frozen, or ship them to other places.

Now that vendors receive fish via airfreight and deliver them right to restaurants, gone are the days that restaurant staff must retrieve fish from the airport. Kaz Edwards, Chef de Cuisine at Uchi in Houston (a sister restaurant to Austin’s Uchi and Uchiko), recalls his biweekly trips to the airport years ago where he would pick up fish from the shipping area and have to deal with all the red tape associated with international shipping.

“If they hold it for any reason, it’s done. It’s over. You basically have to waste that whole box,” he says.

Uchi’s chef de cuisine Kaz Edwards. Image courtesy Uchi Houston.

Cobia crudo at Uchi. Image by Rebecca Fondren.

Now the vendors take the hit when sushi fish is delayed, rather than the restaurants.

When fish travels by plane, the two most important details are time and how it is packaged. That gap between ocean and plate should be as small as possible, and, while there are some variances, less than 24 hours is the goal.

For sushi, extra care must be taken in how the fish is packed. The weight of regular ice results in bruising and degradation of the flesh, while dry ice is too extreme to keep fish at a consistent temperature. Edwards says that slicing through ice-packed fish causes it to break apart and gives it a shredded appearance, so whole fish carefully arranged with insulated ice packs is standard.

When it comes to fresh seafood, how it’s packaged for travel is just one piece of the puzzle. Read how a coalition of conservationists and seafood industry folks is working to give consumers a complete backstory of their catch of the day.

Sushi-grade is a term that indicates a higher quality and is the reassurance many consumers look for when ingesting raw seafood. Sushi-grade can also be used to describe the way a fish is killed and bleeds out — and the traditional iki jime practice is used on the U.S. east and west coasts but not in the Gulf of Mexico.

The FDA addresses all facets of seafood handling in the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) Fish and Fishery Products Hazards and Controls Guidance report, but the reality is that there is no grading system to determine whether fish can be consumed raw. So one must assume a certain level of risk when eating sushi — there are no guarantees.

But the reputation of a restaurant hinges on the quality of their food, and most sushi chefs go to great lengths to ensure the freshest of fish for their customers.

Uchi’s policy is to remove items from the menu if the fish isn’t up to their standards, rather than try to procure it elsewhere at the last minute. The integrity of fish and how it is packaged is always important, but Edwards says that for sushi in particular it’s a key factor in determining whether or not it makes it onto the plate at all.

“It’s just the reality of what we do,” Edwards says.

Oroshi hocho tuna knife at the Tsukiji fishmarket. Image by Chris 73 via Creative Commons. Click image to enlarge.

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Panama’s Big Bet on Big Ships

by Cory Leahy | Jan 4, 2016 | Feature, Issue 1, Stories

A century after the Panama Canal opened, Panama is opening a second set of locks this year that will welcome some of the world’s largest ships. This globe-changing expansion has U.S. farmers celebrating and port officials scrambling, but what does it mean for your plate?

In 2006, the Panama Canal had a problem.

Researchers predicted that by 2012 the canal would be maxed out. The 48-mile-long series of locks, an industrial miracle nearly forgotten by most of the people who benefit from it, would either have to turn ships away or raise prices to decrease demand. Panama’s President Martín Torrijos proposed an expansion of the canal, and in 2007 it began. That’s where our story begins, sort of.

America’s demands for growth — and for fresh food from the other hemisphere — shaped the canal as much as the canal has shaped Americans. Teddy Roosevelt’s brash international ambitions brought the canal into life, which in turn encouraged a century of accelerated consumption and a need to expand the domestic infrastructure to support it. These networks and consumption patterns underlie what foods we see in our supermarkets and how much they cost.

This year, the canal expansion will finally open, but most customers won’t notice anything different in their grocery cart. Why? Because when it’s working, infrastructure is invisible. Water, electricity and food flow in and out of our homes, but we don’t often consider how the links of the supply chain rely on each other. What happens when one of those links doubles in size?

CONNECTING THE OCEANS

Around the time gold was discovered in California, Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps secured permission to build a canal from the Khedive of Egypt in 1854. Construction on what became the Suez Canal began in 1859 and lasted just over 10 years. On the heels of completing the project, Lesseps began to eye Panama.

It took more than a decade, but by 1881 Lesseps had raised funds to build a sea-level canal. He underestimated the time and funds needed to complete the project, but even more daunting were the increasing deaths of his workers who fell ill and died faster than he could replace them. Still not known to transmit disease, mosquitoes were rampantly spreading yellow fever and malaria. By 1884, more than 200 men were dying every month.

Eight years after work began, all the money, more than 1.2 billion French francs, was gone. The project continued on life support until a suitable buyer was found. The asking price: $109 million U.S. dollars. But France was in a bind. They’d sunk hundreds of millions into their failed canal attempt and were still losing cash and workers as they attempted to slow the deterioration of machinery and excavation. The price tag left them with few options for buyers. The United States was an ideal prospect but had leverage — investing in a second canal route that had been found in Nicaragua. When the U.S. put in the lowball offer of $40 million, France had to take it.

The U.S. formally began its canal effort in 1904. By then, officials knew that mosquitoes were the root cause of many illnesses and had access to some preventive medicines. With a more stable workforce, the man running the project, John Frank Stevens, could solve the other major problem: how to build a canal that didn’t require removing millions of tons of dirt. Instead of a sea-level canal, he petitioned for a lock system on two sides of a man-made lake. Each lock would fill with water and empty itself to raise or lower a vessel.

Engineers built Gatun Lake, an artificial body of water 85 feet above sea level, and constructed the three locks on each side to manage the water level as ships passed through the main cut. In 1914, a thousand ships would navigate the canal locks. Nearly a century later, over 14,700 ships traversed the canal per year. Now, during the high season, it is not uncommon for vessels to wait 10 days before transiting the canal. It can cost shippers as much as $50,000 per day to sit idle, stymied by a complex bidding system for a slot in the canal.

The new locks, opening this year, are wider and run parallel to the current locks. The locks allow for ships that are 51 percent wider and 24 percent longer, which translates to 177 percent more containers per ship. Currently the project is $1 billion over budget, with estimates placing the total expansion cost at about $7 billion, about 20 percent of Panama’s. Though the canal expansion has only just been completed, Panama is considering a second expansion to build a fourth set of locks. Estimates put that project in the range of $15 to $20 billion.

The impact of this current expansion can only be imagined. About 55 percent of U.S. agricultural products are shipped through the Panama Canal. After the expansion, up to 80 percent of those products are expected to be shipped through that waterway. More grain passes through the canal than any other item or good. It’s difficult to calculate just how much the new canal will influence food prices, in part because the cost of fuel makes up half of a ship’s operating costs and bigger ships require more fuel to move. Whatever the outcome with regard to prices, it is likely that consumers will enjoy a wider variety of food ingredients as greater capacity will enable a more diverse food supply.

But the increased capacity may not be fully utilized until the global economy gets back on its feet. In 2015, shippers began seeing the impact of erratic movements in world currencies and the lagging economies of developing countries. This slowdown in global economic growth caused large shipping companies such as Maersk to cut back on plans for building new container ships. Stockpiles of empty containers sitting at ports without food to ship also signaled a dampening of hopes for full utilization of the canal expansion.

A wider channel and second set of locks that can accommodate post-Panamax ships now run parallel to the existing Panama Canal. These are the Miraflores locks, the closest to the Pacific. Image by Mike Kelley.

The Panama Canal took more than two decades to complete, including nine years to dig out the 9-mile-long Culebra Cut, which crosses Panama’s continental divide.

Skipping the Line

In 2006, a British oil tanker paid $220,000 to jump ahead of 83 other ships.

BIGGER AND BETTER

The new locks allow for ships that are 51 percent wider and 24 percent longer. This translates to 177 percent more containers per ship.

AN INTERSTATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM IS BORN

Forty years after the Panama Canal was completed, another globe-changing link in the shipping infrastructure came to life: The U.S. Interstate System.

After the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration spent $4 billion (nearly $68 billion today) building and improving roads from coast to coast. With asphalt below the tires, the trucking industry started to take root, and by 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the interstate highway project that now encompasses 47,856 miles of road. Since the 1960s, the number of 18-wheelers has increased from fewer than than 1 million to more than 3 million, and the number of registered vehicles from 74 million to more than 255 million now.

After the highway system opened, intermodal shipping expanded quickly, but we were still missing one key piece, which would neatly link how we moved freight across both land and sea: the shipping container.

Average daily long-haul traffic on the national highway system in the U.S.

THE TWENTY-FOOT EQUIVALENT UNIT

At the same time as Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, a shipping entrepreneur saw the possibilities of combining trucks with ships. Malcolm McLean, the founder of a small trucking company in North Carolina, sent the first modern cargo ship out to sea. He had converted two World War II tankers to carry removable containers. In the mid-1950s, he created the first container ship, Ideal-X, which transported trailers stacked above and below decks. Eventually, he built the Sea-Land Company and created shipping containers that were loaded on and off ships and transported to and from ports on trucks.

The large containers McLean developed are called TEUs — twenty-foot equivalent units — after the containers’ measurements. TEUs can move far greater quantities of goods than moving cargo one piece at a time into a ship’s hold, a long-used method known as break bulk. Today, there are more than 20 million active TEUs, and 90 percent of the things you purchase, including food, have spent time in a shipping container. According to Rose George, author of “Ninety Percent of Everything,” many of the largest container ships have the capacity to transport one banana for every person in Europe.

The modern intermodal system — moving containers from ships to trucks and back again — brought us more food at less cost. But it also resulted during the last century in unintended consequences, such as once-diverse agricultural regions shifting toward monoculture and commodity farming.

Once the full intermodal system opened up, the American diet, though more diverse because of an increased variety of food being transported, started to become standardized. The food sold in a grocery store in one part of the country looked a lot like the food sold in every other part of the country, but few people realized that infrastructure was what was shaping their diet.

Malcom McLean started a trucking company in 1935 and sold his stake in it twenty years later for $6 million, which funded his shipping company.

BIGGER BOATS, BIGGER PORTS

As more containers came into circulation, an interesting trend began to appear. Instead of building more ships, companies were building larger ships. For the companies, this meant significant cost savings. For the canals and ports, it was one never-ending (and expensive) nightmare.

Without much regard for existing infrastructure, ships have continued to balloon in size, and if they can’t fit through one canal or port, they are then routed to another port that can accommodate them, creating a fairly tidy demonstration of supply and demand.

This competition has led to intense spending across the world to accommodate ever-growing cargo ships. Ports are dredging land under water to create deeper channels to the docks. They are buying larger cranes and investing in automated technologies, including driverless vehicles called AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles) and automated straddle carriers that can move containers around a terminal. Some ports, like the one in Portland, Oregon, are struggling to stay profitable because they can’t keep up with the growth of the ships.

Likewise for canals, there’s a very real urgency to update because they feel the pressure of competition too. Though it’s convenient, a ship doesn’t have to take the Panama Canal. Those coming from Asia to the United States can go through the Suez Canal, which completed its own expansion in 2015, adding a second shipping lane and deepening the existing one to allow for increased traffic and larger ships.

The Suez Canal isn’t the only other option for a shipping company. Melting ice has led to the development of arctic shipping lanes, and all eyes have been on Nicaragua, where a second Pacific-Atlantic canal is in the works. A slump in the Chinese economy has slowed the development of the canal, spearheaded by Chinese billionaire Wang Jing, but if the project can regain momentum, it will represent one of the largest earthmoving projects in history, employing 50,000 people. For context, the Panama Canal is 48 miles long, 15 miles of which is Gatun Lake. If the Nicaraguan Canal is completed it will be 170 miles long, with 66 miles on Nicaragua Lake.

When Panama saw its capacity ceiling approaching and ships widening, authorities made the call to add a third, wider set of locks. Almost immediately, ports, especially along the Eastern seaboard and Gulf Coast, began planning the improvements they’d have to make to attract more traffic.

The Port of New Orleans spent nearly $40 million to expand container handling capabilities, according to Director of External Affairs Matt Gresham. As reefer technology has improved, so has the demand for storage of these refrigerated containers. The Port of New Orleans spent $7.9 million to build a container racking system that can store 600 refrigerated containers, many holding imported bananas or poultry ready for export.

The Port of Miami is also hustling to attract the big ships. Last year, the port completed a dredging project that deepened the port by 50 feet, which allows them to service ships up to 22 containers wide. With this kind of volume, the Miami port is poised to become the primary entry point for products from South America, which would then be loaded onto trucks and distributed across the country.

These expansions are well-grounded. The Panama Canal expansion is going to unlock a huge amount of volume with roughly the same number of ships.

But the canal expansion and port renovations are still not enough for ships like Maersk’s Triple-E class and several Mediterranean Shipping Company vessels, which are among the largest container ships in the world. In 2014, the China Shipping Container Lines launched the CSCL, a container ship with a capacity of more than 19,000 containers. These newer, larger ships can load more containers, travel faster, and provide greater fuel efficiency. Bigger ships mean bigger capacity, and it’s easier to build a bigger ship than to dredge a port or expand a canal.

Farmers in the U.S. have also been pushing for port renovations and canal expansions because they know those changes to the supply chain infrastructure will mean more buyers for their goods. In 2011 China moved ahead of Canada as the largest importer of U.S. agricultural products. During 2012–2013, the U.S. provided almost a quarter of all agricultural imports to China. A significant percentage of those imported agricultural products are grains. The canal expansion is of particular interest to companies facilitating the shipment of those grains from the Midwest, where many of them are grown. And it appears that most developing countries will be net food importers due to rising incomes, lagging infrastructure and agricultural practices.

REEFER SHIP

A reefer ship is a refrigerated cargo ship; a type of ship typically used to transport perishable commodities which require temperature-controlled transportation, such as fruit, meat, fish, vegetables, dairy products and other foods.

LABOR DISPUTES

Labor disputes frequently bring intermodal shipping to a halt. In early 2015, dockworkers practically shut down nearly 30 ports along the West Coast of the United States, leaving dozens of cargo ships stranded all up and down the seaboard. This didn’t only mean that goods, including perishable foods, were floating offshore: It also meant that U.S.-grown food was rotting while waiting to be picked up.

The 2015 dockworker labor dispute forced a backlog of trucks at the Port of Los Angeles, where hundreds of trucks and dozens of cargo ships waiting to pick up and unload freight. This port, along with the port in Long Beach, handle more than 40 percent of goods entering the U.S. and almost 30 percent of its exports. Images by Mike Kelley.

EXPANDING A TASTE FOR GLOBAL FOOD

Expanding the canal will shift where ships dock, but it won’t shift our palate or our consumption levels, experts say. America has plenty of food. We import food because we like variety and we demand it all year. Not long ago, finding a fresh pineapple during a Minnesota winter would have been a miracle, but now, you can find plenty of them on produce shelves just about every day of the year.

The expanded canals will increase this kind of globalized eating in other places in the world. Asia’s consumption habits, for instance, have changed tremendously in the past 20 years, with per capita consumption of rice decreasing and consumption of wheat, protein and convenience food and drinks on the rise.

In building the interstate to unify the country, we created immense opportunities for trade while implicitly encouraging product standardization and the dissolution of regional mainstays. Ten general stores have given way to one central Walmart. States have become known for farming only one or two commodities. The same gas station burritos are sold along all 2,460 miles of I-10. These things aren’t inherently bad — except for the burritos — but they represent a shift in cultural values made possible by expanding infrastructure.

We’ve seen the interstate system revolutionize how we grow and transport food. We’ve seen reefers, shipping containers, ports and canals guarantee a consistent supply of produce from tropical countries. Alternatively, we’ve seen the food we have grown and the diet we created packaged up and exported to other countries through those very same channels.

Time will tell exactly what happens after the third locks — and maybe the fourth — open in the Panama Canal, and whether the Chinese-built Nicaraguan Canal, if completed, will turn everything that we know about canal economics on its head.

The Panama Canal expansion won’t show up on the average American consumer’s grocery receipt. The cost savings will be eaten up by shipping companies, and though your mango may arrive a day earlier, you won’t know it. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, but with our growing interest in food and where it comes from, maybe we’ll demand more transparency from a system that thrives on invisibility.