73. A Rose By Any Other Distance

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?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring. Great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it. Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life, like banking, for example? Well, PNC Bank did, since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely-not-yolo type. PNC Bank: brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.

• 0:48Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:21Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by ChatGPT. ChatGPT Work is a new way to work in ChatGPT. ChatGPT Work can pull info from across your apps and connect to your tools to help you create finished work. You can even automate work in ChatGPT with the Scheduled Tasks feature, and the whole time you stay in control. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  From APM, American Public Media and WNYC,

• 2:54Speaker 01

  this is Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace. Here's the host of Marketplace, Kai Rizdal.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  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 good to talk to you.

• 3:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Great to be here, Kai. Hey, you know, it seems like you talk about your mom on the show quite a bit. Am I, am I right?

• 3:19Speaker 02

  I don't know, maybe.

• 3:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  And it sounds, from what I hear, that you two have a fairly loving relationship. I'm also right on that?

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Number one, she's listening, so watch yourself. And number two, yeah, you know, we get along, me and mom.

• 3:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  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, yes?

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Okay, two things. One is that it's all I can do to remember to get my wife flowers on Mother's Day, let it on 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.

• 3:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ah, but mom does get them.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  But she gets something, yeah, yeah.

• 3:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  She gets them. So she is not alone. In the US, 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 Vaie is a flower wholesaler in Los Angeles. He handles about 2 million flowers a year, and here's how they get to him.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Anything that's coming out of South America is generally airfreighted into Miami, then it's trucked over to California.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  They fly to Miami and then drive it to here?

• 4:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 gonna be, here's what I want to know. Where is the outrage over these globe-trotting Mother's Day flowers? 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.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  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?

• 5:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  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. 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?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  I don't want that to happen, okay? It's the last thing I want to happen. So let's look to a different holiday for a potential solution. 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% fake Christmas trees, meaning there's no need to grow and transport another tree next year, you know, the year after.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Hey, wait, no, stop, because I'm not doing a fake Christmas tree. I'm just not gonna do it.

• 6:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me try to persuade you of a little something. Kai, you have a package there in the studio? We sent you something by airfreight. It's a good time to open that up.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  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?

• 6:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do you think? How do they look?

• 6:29Speaker 02

  They look lovely. They're yellow roses.

• 6:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what are they made of?

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're not real.

• 6:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  They're plastic flowers.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  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.

• 7:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 re-gift this bouquet I sent you. Because like Professor Friedberg suggests, you know. So because I understand you're a bit of a cheapskate as well.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, thanks, Kai.

• 7:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 8:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 9:00Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 9:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern Company. The world and its energy needs are always changing. Southern Company's commitment to meeting this demand stays the same. That's because Southern Company believes energy is more than a utility. It's what powers possibilities. So they are looking ahead and investing $80 billion in infrastructure upgrades and are committed to fueling growth in ways that benefit all customers so that reliable and affordable energy is accessible for generations to come. Go to southerncompany.com to learn more. Southern Company: building the future of energy.

• 10:08Speaker 05

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