Assignment 1: Gleaning; Morgan, Shinah, Ali

Driven by the desire and curiosity to better know where our food comes from, our gleaning investigation started by observing a range of Providence grocery options. Whole Foods, the RI Farm Fresh Farmer's Market, Stop & Shop and 7-Eleven became the key case-studies in which we observed the origin of various fruits and vegetables. The following images are the origins of apples in first winter then summer. The left column depicts the macro scale of the journey from farm to distribution center to retail, and the right column the micro. The lack of a macro scale indicates that the procedure occurs at an entirely micro scale.

One of the most interesting finds of our research was the use of low oxygen storage technology by which most apples are stored today. Low oxygen storage allows apples to stay fresher for much longer, allowing them to be picked closer to their ripening date, no matter how long the journey before them is. What was interesting about this discovery was the question of how it complicates the question of the local versus the nonlocal in terms of carbon footprint. If Washington can produce and ship fresh apples (without low oxygen storage) in a month that Rhode Island would need to draw from low oxygen stores- is the local still more valuable than the non-local (at least in terms of carbon footprint)?