[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Arragonis

We have thousands of miles of greenhouses in the UK but the tomatoes I bought this morning came from Egypt.

Having a fresh tomato in February is a luxury, is it not? So you folks in Britain can, without more than a bit of whining, do without your February tomatos, and your package flights off to Spain or various Indian Ocean resorts.

The supermarkets (Tesco, Walmart etc.) drive prices down from their suppliers, and in turn they look to reduce their primary cost (labour) by moving to where that is cheaper.

Now is it really cost of labour that grows tomatos in North Africa in the winter? Or is it more the total cost of growing them in open fields & shipping, vs constructing & running greenhouses to grow them locally?

...last time I looked Egypt was hot and dry and tomatoes like hot and wet...

Last time I looked, the area along the Nile IS hot and wet.

We (in Europe) get our stuff from North Africa, you (the US) get yours from Central and South America. The same drivers are in play - costs.

It's far more gowing seasons than anything. I can today buy fruit - peaches, blueberries, blackberries, etc - that's grown in Chile and shipped here by air, but it's expensive. As the season progresses, I'll see stuff grown in northern Mexico & southern California, and it'll be cheaper. Later on, it'll come from California's central valley (or some from my own garden, or the few farms this side of the Sierra Nevada), and will be cheap because it doesn't have to be shipped very far. And as the season runs towards fall, I'll see it coming from Oregon, Washington, and finally southern BC.

I'd see the same pattern when I lived in Switzerland. Early fruits & vegetables would come from North Africa, then as the season progressed from southern Italy & Spain, then the north. In midsummer I could get the same fruits from local fields, then later from places in northern Europe.

But all this is luxury: our forefathers didn't have much of it. (Though you might be surprised at some of the things they did have. I'm reading a book "Founding Foodies" about cooking in American Revolutionary times, and many recipes call for lemons, limes, mangos, & other tropical fruit.) And yet they didn't starve, nor suffer an economic collapse for want of fresh tomatos in midwinter.