Saturday, April 01, 2006

Ethiopian green beans in Europe

So I visit the grocery department, and without much thinking, I pick up a bag of fresh green beans, absentmindedly wondering in what kind of greenhouse these would've been grown. In this day and age, you can eat season's vegetables year-round, but I tend to try and stick to the veggies that don't come from greenhouses, because when I was a kid I once saw on educational T.V. that the energy used to grow one tomato in winter could run a radio for a whole year. Colour me heavily impressed, as a kid. Now, a wee bit older, I see how utterly flawed their comparison was, I mean: one radio for one year, what kind of measurement is that? A megawatt radio? or a crystal radio? (runs without batteries.)
But still, whenever I see tomatoes in winter, I think about those radio's.

Anywayz... The green beans. They just looked too good to ignore so I picked up a bag and was pleasantly surprised they were cheap, too!

And then, some hours later, me preparing munchies, picking up the bag, and seeing the label that reads "country of origin: Ethiopia."

Boy.

And I had the radio on, playing in the background, so I could hear some news.
Guess what? Yep, I just heard about the drought there, threathening the lives of some 2.5 million people...

Crazy world.