How much for that packet of peas?

I was shelling some of our modest crop of peas the other day ready for lunch. Pea-shelling is rather a meditative experience and it got me musing. I remembered tranquil afternoons as a child shelling peas for my mother back in the days when peas were more likely to come in their pods from our friendly neighbourhood greengrocer than in a plastic bag from the freezer of a large, faceless supermarket.

How clever, I thought, of nature to design such perfect Pea Packaging. Surely, only a species as simultaneously intelligent and stupid as the human race could think of replacing a naturally occurring, lightweight, biodegradable packaging with a plastic bag just in order to sell the peas frozen, thought I...But then it occurred to me that its all rather more complex than that.

Firstly there growth of the peas themselves, most likely an industrial farm, using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. These chemicals would have been made in a fossil-fuel-lit factory and packaged into plastic bags on a fossil-fuelled conveyor belt by people who probably got to the factory by means of a fossil-fuelled means of transport be it public or, worse, private.

These plastic bags would have been produced in another fossil-fuelled factory and transported by another fossil-fuelled vehicle by another set of people who also probably got to the factory by means of fossil-fuelled transport.

Back to the peas: Transport those peas from the farms by means of a fossil-fuelled vehicle to a fossil-fuelled factory where they are packaged into plastic bags on a fossil-fuelled conveyor belt by people who...long etc.

Then transporting the packets of peas in a huge, fossil-fuel-burning, chilled vehicle to a fossil-fuel-burning freezer in a fossil-fuel-lit supermarket so that we, the deluded consumer, can go there in our own fossil-fuelled vehicle, pick up the plastic-packaged peas, put them in a plastic carrier bag and take them home, once again in our fossil-fuelled vehicle.

Once home we store the peas in our fossil-fuelled freezer (made in a fossil-fuel-lit factory- very long etc.) for day, weeks or, even, months until we decide to cook the peas on our fossil-fuelled cooker. We then throw away the plastic carrier bag (to be removed by the fossil-fuelled refuse lorry) or if we are 'green' we put it in a recycling bin (hopefully we don't have to get out our fossil-fuelled vehicle to do so) where it will be transported in a fossil-fuelled lorry to a fossil-fuelled recycling plant...And then when we cook the peas we then throw away or recycle the plastic bag the peas are packaged in - insert, again, a very long etc.

When I finished shelling my peas, I put aside the less-appetising ones to dry out and plant and put all the pods into a dwarf-sized dustbin that we keep on our kitchen counter to hold vegetable leftovers until someone - usually my better half - can be bothered to take it down to the compost heap at the bottom of the garden. How little those peas had travelled compared to their frozen counterparts...just the short journey up the steps from the garden to the kitchen and back down again. Shame about the fossil-fuelled cooker, but still...

Illustration: Peas on Earth under creative commons license from TW Collins