Elizabeth Rosenthal has a great opening paragraph to her NYT story about the environmental costs of shipping food here and there around the world:

Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of Europe’s peas are grown and packaged in Kenya.

Rosenthal says that Kiwis from Sanifrutta, Italy, travel by sea in refrigerated containers: 18 days to the United States, 28 to South Africa and more than a month to reach New Zealand.