What I’m Writing and Why #2
Building on space and the distance between us and our food makers, I wrote today on transportation costs. When someone tells you that it’s more expensive to ship an apple from the orchards in Washington State to New York than from Upstate New York, look dumbfounded. You can come back with a list of factors that make up the cost of moving food and they are dynamic and unpredictable.
As early as 1850, economists were calculating cost savings of delivering food by railway. Dionysus Lardner’s Railway Economy goes into excruciating detail about the savings both by eliminating food waste and by extending the foodshed as a result of the arrival of steam locomotives.
Henry Hodges wrote in a report published in 1916 about food distribution that was too costly. He resented the many “hucksters”, as he called last mile delivery entrepreneurs, who used teams of horses instead of the new trolleys, clogging up the roads while charging too much for delayed shipments. He was frantic that strawberries came and went from Delaware to a central market in Philadelphia at a high cost, involving administrators, middlemen, and time delays.
And now I’m reading about transportation costs as defined by the US Department of Transportation, with its numerous tables and graphs that describe the Seven Sources of Congestion. More interesting will be the next topic, the friction of geography. Am wondering if distance is at all relevant to the cost of our food.