Almond Joy

We were instructed to bring one food item to class which was either very sustainable or very unsustainable. My choice was to bring organic almonds. I went to Mother Earth natural food store in Fort Myers and filled up a bag of their organic whole almonds. Compared to almonds in most stores, they were not pre-packaged so just in that alone they already struck me as more sustainable. Many products are grown and then shipped somewhere else for preserving and packaging and then they are shipped to a grocery store so this is a huge plus.

Second, the fact that organic farming uses very little harmful pesticides and other products that harm the earth is another plus. This can sometimes reduce yields for some foods, but in the case of the almond, I have read that it is very minimal. Nearly all of the almonds we eat in the United States come from California and as such, there is significant food miles associated with buying almonds in Florida. I have read about some areas of the panhandle which have the climate to grow them but I could not find any in this area that were Florida grown. The up side is that it is not a food item that we ship from other countries, and therefore food miles are less than many other foods. Also, everything is done in California, like washing, loading, and shipping so only one trip is needed. One interesting tid-bit is that almond trees normally required mass organized pollination by bees. This required massive amounts of bees to be shipped in to pollinate the trees in California which is incredibly unsustainable and cannot be good for honey bee conservation efforts. Almond growers bred a new variety of almond that was self-pollinating but with much lower yields and thus unusable. Later a hybrid between the two varieties was developed in order to increase yields and retain the self-pollination trait of the newer variety. Many almond growers have been switching to this new variety but I was unable to find out the method used for the ones I purchased.