tmgallant
Peach Salsa
For my dish, I decided to make peach salsa. I absolutely love this dish because it is not spicy at all. I cannot handle traditional Mexican salsas because they are too spicy for me. This dish is perfect for anyone who does not like spicy food or simply wants a sweeter salsa. I really wanted to see what the “true cost” of this dish is. I wanted to see how much it really took to be able to make peach salsa. So I investigated where all of the ingredients to make this dish came from.
As it turns out, some of the ingredients did come from the United States. The onions that go into this dish came from Walla Walla, Washington. The peaches are from Bentonville, Arizona and the Catalina salad dressing that’s in the salsa is from Chicago, Illinois. I thought that this was pretty good considering I thought they were all going to be from Mexico or some other foreign land in order to get here. Unfortunately, two of the ingredients are from out of the country. The red bell peppers are from Ontario, Canada and the tomatoes are from Sinaloa, Mexico. So I got to wondering how much it really costs to get the ingredients to Plymouth, New Hampshire. The numbers that I came up with are staggering to me.
I got these numbers by looking for where each of these ingredients came from and from there I used google maps to find out how many miles the ingredients traveled. Next I had to find out how many miles per gallon an 18 wheeler truck got. As it turns out, one of those trucks can only get about seven miles to the gallon. So I took the miles from where the ingredient started to Plymouth, New Hampshire and divided that by seven. This gave me how many gallons of gas it would take for the truck to make it all the way here. I then looked up the national average price for a gallon of diesel gas which is about $2.50. So I took how many gallons of gas it would take for the truck to bring the ingredients to the Walmart store in Plymouth, New Hampshire and multiplied that number by 2.5 in order to see what the cost of transportation was. So when calculating how much it costs to get the sweet onions from Walla Walla, Washington I had to take the mileage, which is 2,917 miles and divide that by seven for how many gallons of gas are needed. That comes out to 416.71 gallons of gas needed. Multiplying that by 2.5 to see what the cost of gas would be overall gives me $1,041.79 total fuel cost. I did this with the other ingredients and found that the red peppers from Canada cost about $429.29. The peaches from Arizona cost $546.79 and the tomatoes from Mexico cost about $1,117.14. The last ingredient was Catalina salad dressing from Chicago, Illinois which cost about $352.86. After adding up all these totals I found out that the food travelled a total of 9,766 miles which takes about 1,395.14 gallons of gas. This makes the grand total of $3,487.87 in order to get all the ingredients to Plymouth, New Hampshire.
After finding all this out, I was curious. Is it really worth it to get all this food from other countries? While local foods tend to cost more, it takes up more fossil fuels to get the cheaper produce from other countries and even other parts of the United States. I could probably get all the ingredients from inside the United States when they are in season. However, what would I do when I wanted peach salsa when it was out of season? All of the ingredients are either Summer or Fall crops. Barbara Kingsolver would probably just tell me that I should go without because it will taste so much better when it is in season than when it is out of season. I honestly do not taste a difference because even when I make this salsa in season, the produce still comes from out of the country because it is cheaper for me to buy it that way. So is it better to save the environment and pay more money to get the produce? Or is it impossible and will we be forever stuck in this cycle of ruining our environment just so that we can get the food that we want when we want it?
I also started to wonder how much this salsa is really a Mexican salsa? I know that most salsas are Mexican in origin. However, all of the salsas from Mexico that I have ever had have been spicy. This salsa is very sweet-tasting because of the peaches. Maybe this is the United States version of Mexico’s salsa or maybe it could be something that another culture that is not even considered in this paper has made.
After calculating all of this out, it was time for me to start making the salsa! It was super easy to make and did not take much time at all. All I had to do was put all of the ingredients in a blender and voila! Peach salsa is done. You can always change how much of each ingredient you put in the salsa but I used one big onion, three tomatoes, a big can of peaches, two big red bell peppers and a jar of catalina salad dressing. The color bell pepper that you use does not really matter much either. I prefer green but there were not any at Walmart when I went to buy the ingredients.