Freakonomics Radio - 73. A Rose By Any Other Distance

Episode Date: May 2, 2012

At a time when people worry about every mile their food must travel, why is it okay to import most of our cut flowers from thousands of miles away?

From APM, American Public Media, and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace. Here's the host of Marketplace, Kai Risdahl. Time now for a little bit of Freakonomics Radio, that moment every couple of weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blogs of the same name. It is the hidden side of everything. Dubner, as always, it's the books and the blogs of the same name. It is The Hidden Side of Everything. Dubner, as always, it's good to talk to you. Great to be here, Kai. Hey, you know, it seems like you talk about your mom on the show quite a bit.

Am I right? I don't know. Maybe. And it sounds from what I hear that you two have a fairly loving relationship. I'm also right on that. Number one, she's listening, so watch yourself. And number two, yeah, you know, we get along, me and mom. I'm just thinking with Mother's Day coming up, you know, two Sundays from now, I'm guessing you're thinking about maybe sending your mom some flowers.

Okay, two things. One is that it's all I can do to remember to get my wife flowers on Mother's Day, let alone my own mother. And two, the dirty secret, which I will deny if you repeat it, my wife actually does the flowers for my mother. Ah, but mom does get them. But she gets them. She gets them. So. She gets them. So she is not alone. In the U.S. every year, we spend about $12 billion on cut flowers alone.

Mother's Day is obviously a huge part of that. But here's something you may not know, Kai. About 80% of these cut flowers are imported mostly from equatorial countries that get, you know, 12 hours of year-round sunlight. Mario Valle is a flower wholesaler in Los Angeles. He handles about 2 million flowers a year. And here's how they get to him. Anything that's coming out of South America is generally air freighted into Miami. Then it's trucked over to California.

They fly to Miami and then drive it to here? And I do not want to rain on your mother's parade or anybody's mother's parade, but there is something going on here. Okay. We live in this day and age where people are obsessed with food miles and the carbon footprint of everything that we consume. So if that's the way we're going to be, here's what I want to know. Where is the outrage over these globetrotting Mother's Day flowers? Okay. I mean, if you ship food across the planet, at least we eat it. It's our sustenance, right? But with flowers, you just look at them for a couple of days and then, you know, into the trash.

So this is you up on your high horse here. You are now killing all the joy and glory that is Mother's Day and cut flowers in this country? Kai, it is not my nature to scold. I'd hope you know that by now. But I do find it curious that cut flowers have somehow escaped the environmental scrutiny that accompanies what we eat, how we transport ourselves. You know, it may be a halo effect from the flowers themselves. I mean, how do you hate on roses and tulips? They're so pretty, right? Yeah. So here's the thing, though. If I don't,

well, let me rephrase that. If my wife doesn't send my mother flowers for Mother's Day, then I'm in deep and serious trouble. I don't want that to happen me rephrase that. If my wife doesn't send my mother flowers for Mother's Day, then I'm in deep and serious trouble. I don't want that to happen. OK. That's the last thing I want to happen. So let's look to a different holiday for a potential solution. OK. Christmas.

Every year we buy about 35 million Christmas trees in this country, about $2 billion worth. Now, again, we're talking crops that are harvested and transported solely for our viewing but not our eating pleasure. But every year, the share of artificial Christmas trees grows, and now we're up to about 40 percent fake Christmas trees, meaning there's no need to grow and transport another tree next year, the year after. Hey, wait. No, stop because I'm not doing a fake Christmas tree. I'm just not going to do it. Let me try to persuade you of a little something. Kai, you have a package there in the studio. We sent you something by air freight. It's a good time to open that up.

Okay. Number one, I'm a little disappointed because it's clearly not beer. But all right. That's fine. Is this a corsage or something equally sensitive? What do you think? How do they look? They look lovely.

They're yellow roses. And what are they made of? Yeah, they're not real. They're yellow roses. And what are they made of? Yeah, they're not real. They're plastic flowers. And they're beautiful, right? They do wonderful things with plastic these days. So here's the thing. We may associate flowers with nature and plastic with the opposite. But that is, in fact, a very simplistic view of how the world actually works. So here's Suzanne Friedberg. She's a Dartmouth professor and author who's been studying how carbon footprints are calculated. Here's what she thinks of the

idea of giving plastic flowers instead of real ones. Because they're so lightweight, they wouldn't need to be flown anywhere. They wouldn't decompose and produce greenhouse gases in any landfill. There's the endless lifespan. So the possibility is for regifting them. So Kai, listen, if you really love your mother, and I'm not implying that you don't, by the way, I want you to think about sending her, having your wife send her some plastic flowers this year. Because if you want, you can even regift this bouquet I sent you, like Professor Friedberg suggests, you know, because I understand you're a bit of a cheapskate as well. Hey, man. I am, actually. How did you know? Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics.com is the website. He'll be back in a couple of weeks. We'll see you, man.

Hey, thanks, Guy. Coming up on next week's podcast, there's a guy named Caleb in Oklahoma City who likes to argue with atheists. And when they say they don't believe in the existence of a soul, Caleb says, all right, so why don't you sell me yours? Give you 50 bucks for it. So you'll hear from Caleb, from the guy he finally convinced to sell his soul, and from Harvard professor Michael Sandel, who talks about the moral limits of markets.

Talk to you then.