IS BEING VEGETARIAN, VEGAN OR SIMPLY PREFERING VEGETABLES REALLY A SUSTAINABLE CHOICE?
erika mugnai on
IS BEING VEGETARIAN, VEGAN OR SIMPLY PREFERING VEGETABLES REALLY A SUSTAINABLE CHOICE?
today I want to share with you a reflection of mine, in the light of what I have seen in these last days of vacation in Sicily.
Spring has definitely arrived here, everything is in bloom and the insects are pollinating, the pollinable!
Sicily is the great Mother, which satisfies our hunger for vegetables and fruit.
Above all of first fruits and tomatoes, aubergines, peppers and courgettes, which grow here all year round thanks to an African climate. If this definition seems exaggerated to you, look on a map to which parallel is the area of the province of Ragusa. It is exactly on the same level as Tunis, Tunisia.
Thanks to this climate, which reaches 50°C in summer, 'only' 3.8 million quintals of vegetables are produced in an area of 8,000 hectares each year.
Unfortunately it's not all vegetables that glitter, but an infinite expanse of plastic greenhouses.
I'm out of sight. In addition to the fact that they are really a landscape havoc, they are also really impactful, on an environmental level.
The ground is sad. Practically non-existent because it is covered in plastic, so as not to let weeds grow.
Slender tomato stalks are seen growing towards the light. They are fed by huge tubs of water with flashy colors and an unnatural smell.
Outside the greenhouses there are no cars, it seems that no one works there and instead you see hundreds of people, all North Africans, coming out at a certain time. They are loaded like cattle into a van and taken to the square where they were loaded in the morning, where the rusty bus or means of transport awaits them.
People who work in greenhouses have black eyes. Not the color of the eyes, the eyeball is not white, it looks 'roasted' by the sun or who knows what.
Systemic treatments of various types are carried out inside the greenhouses and the protections I have seen are reduced to a covid mask.
There are BIO companies surrounded by conventional companies and I wonder how much these organic vegetables can be.
I'm telling you all this to reflect with you, out loud, on the fact that certain places show that we can't work like this for long.
Soils with zero nutrition
Nutrients given intravenously to plants
Plastic that tears with the wind and flies everywhere
Unprotected workers from various points of view
Zero biodiversity
The Sicilian production is 90% absorbed by the large supermarket chains. Large-scale distribution sets the price per kg for fruit and vegetables and those who produce will continue to devastate the planet and human beings in order to survive.
I am writing all this because I wish that the next time you go to buy fruit or vegetables, if it is cheap, it is clear that the environment and those who have worked there are not exactly 'happy'.
I had to tell you what I saw in this piece of land because we have the purchasing power. If we only buy seasonal fruit and vegetables from a local producer, we don't increase all of this.
While if we buy from large retailers, first fruits, products that arrive from the other side of the world, we are responsible for certain patterns.
Sicily is a splendid land, full of small local producers who make sensational products. We must support these precious companies that preserve traditions and biodiversity and abandon the price race, our hunger for out-of-season vegetables that only feeds this havoc.
