Easter – Made in China

Easter morning the kids scurried around the house in search of sweets. They excitedly rushed around the house to find chocolate eggs and bunnies, jellied eggs, frosted cookies and a false-bottomed plastic form in their Peter Rabbit Collection bucket showing only 50% of the product one thought was there.

I walked into the local Tesco on Saturday, where there was a sea of green Easter product boxes. The common denominator was the length they had travelled.

The Peter Rabbit Collection was made in China. It travelled to Kinnerton Confectionary in Pymble near Sydney before being shipped to the UK and then sent by truck to each local Tesco store.

Conservatively, using statute air miles distances from infoplease.com, these eggs flew or were shipped then trucked some 15,600 miles from Shanghai to Sydney to a store just outside of Cardiff. We have no idea how far inland from Shanghai they were produced which could add up to another 2,000 trucking miles. The cookies appear to have travelled a slightly shorter distance, only 11,000 miles.

The Kindercare chocolate surprise egg products are as much a mystery as their content prize. Their packaging only says they were “imported” by a UK business but not from where – very clever indeed. The eggs have a plastic toy embedded inside and one might safely assume that those toys are made in China? We don’t know.

Only Thornton’s eggs were UK produced.

To add insult to this carbon footprint, each cookie was individually shrink-wrapped and sealed in plastic (requiring a knife or scissors to open), set in a form fitting plastic tray, sealed with two additional layers of plastic film and slid into a cardboard box sealed with plastic sticky tape.

And, the cookies and jelly eggs were produced 100+ days ago (before Christmas ’07) to begin their long journey across the ocean. According to them, they will remain edible until Christmas of 2008. What kind of preservatives are needed to keep something baked with flour, sugar and eggs edible for that long a period of time?

Was there not a single UK-based commercial baker that could produce three cookies for .59 - .99 pence?

Are we content having any company say it’s cheaper to produce and ship them across oceans than to truck 100-200 miles from a UK baker?

What are these doing to the environment?

What do these do to the health our children? We have more and more cases of severe nut allergies than I remember. How good can it be to have so many preservatives ingested into their bodies?

It certainly gave us pause…

Now, enjoy those Easter candies.