One of my big pet peeves is the tradition of beautiful red roses for Valentine’s Day. I’ve written about this many times before but the issue doesn’t go away.
When I was in high school I had a good job working for a florist. I enjoyed working with flowers, cleaning them, putting them in water and learning to arrange them. For Valentine’s Day we always received tons and tons of long stem red roses. My best friend Sharon and I spent days cleaning the thorns off the roses which were always significantly more expensive for the two weeks before Valentine’s Day than any other time of the year.
Now I know that these roses were grown in South America where they don’t have any controls on pesticides. From there the roses are put in refrigerated airplanes and flown all around the United States. Just think about the amount of carbon pollution put out by the refrigeration on the planes and the planes themselves. Just so someone can buy them and give them on Valentine’s Day. Roses look pretty for about three or four days, maybe a week if they’ve been treated with a lot of preservatives. Then they die and get thrown away, usually into garbage cans to be sent to landfills.
1. Locally grown, pesticide free, cut flowers
2. A plant
3. Fancy chocolate
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