Packed where?

[matchmaker]

I decided to make a fish pie today so bought frozen raw king prawns and frozen smoked haddock from Tesco. King prawns - produce of Vietnam, packed in Vietnam. Smoked haddock - caught in NE Atlantic or Barents Sea, packed in...China! I've heard of food miles but that is verging on the riduculous.

[21TonyK]

Green beans from Kenya and carrots from China. You'd think we could at least grow our own carrots!

[Doofus]

Fishing boats can travel thousands of miles to make catches.

[RizzoTheRat]

There was a bit of a fuss a few years back when something shellfish related (prawn shelling maybe) closed in Scotland because it was cheaper to ship them to far east, do the job there an then ship them back. Sounds crazy but for labour intensive jobs the staff costs massively outweigh the transport costs.

As for veg, nobody thinks about seasons any more, it used to be you ate what was in season, now everything's in season somewhere so loads gets shifted half way around the world because people want stuff that isn't in season here now. That doesn't excuse carrots though which you usually harvest about now.

[bigandclever]

Not really a surprise though? It's cheaper to process in China, given their facilities and the sheer volume of produce they process. It wouldn't surprise me if it's 'better' for the environment in terms of some metrics because the Chinese are better at processing so there's less wastage (that might also be greenwashing of course!).

[FredericRobinson]

RizzoTheRat said:

There was a bit of a fuss a few years back when something shellfish related (prawn shelling maybe) closed in Scotland because it was cheaper to ship them to far east, do the job there an then ship them back. Sounds crazy but for labour intensive jobs the staff costs massively outweigh the transport costs.

That was langoustine/ scampi processing, as with sending fish to China for processing these things are labour intensive and sold in global markets, and the supermarkets are highly competitive against each other on price, which in turn is driven by consumers, people aren’t going to pay more because something has been processed in the UK.

[Cotty]

[dapprman]

RizzoTheRat said:

There was a bit of a fuss a few years back when something shellfish related (prawn shelling maybe) closed in Scotland because it was cheaper to ship them to far east, do the job there an then ship them back. Sounds crazy but for labour intensive jobs the staff costs massively outweigh the transport costs.

Was about to bring this one up - that was scampi.