When you come to think of it, most of the food on your plate has a history behind it – a long journey that we are unable to describe. In her book Food Routes: Growing Bananas in Iceland and Other Tales from the Logistics of Eating (2019), Robyn Shotwell Metcalfe refers to the paradox of fish being caught in New England, exported to Japan, and then shipped back as sushi, revealing a large and complex network that nobody can see when they buy takeout Japanese food at the local grocery store.
Just to give an idea of the magnitude of these routes, in his text Da Fazenda para a Cidade (From the farm to the city), Rafael Tonon comments that 95% of the food in the USA travels more than 1.6 thousand kilometers to reach the retail outlets. This means that all the vegetables available in US markets take a week to arrive from the East Coast and be distributed throughout the country. This is no different in Brazil. According to the National Logistics Plan, 2.4 trillion tkm (ton-kilometer) of food freight were transported throughout the year in 2015, 65% of which was by land and 26% by waterway. This is a very long journey to get to the supermarket shelves.
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