I agree. "Eating fresh" out of season is overall the real "luxury" - one developped countries east and west have gotten used to and find normal. I don't know the situation in Sweden (though the climate is loosely comparable to ours - not the energy situation however) but a nasty side-effect of those habits is that people here got used to those imported veggies, and those exportators got used to their markets. The prices for veggies from south America are low, too low. We're got terrific farming land, but more and more farmers stop doing veggies and fruits, they just can't compete with Mexico or Chili, or California. The local farmers find it extremely hard to get their products into the grocery chains in season despite high customer demand for local products (that resulted in a big expansion of seasonal farmer-markets, but that's limited - and the distributors of foreign products already start occupying space in those markets...) - the exportators and their distributors are aggressively occupying most of the space.

There's a lot of talks about year-round greenhouses (about increasing their number a lot as they already exist), and more recently about opening urban farms (huge glasshouses on top of the cities' square km of flat rooftops, omnipresent in our architecture), but it's not developping that fast. Studies estimate we could easily produce up to 50% of Montréal's needs in veggies and fruits year-long, seriously cutting down importations for everything not exotic, if we developped urban farming more (right now there a just a few of those urban farms, not small though. Some of us can buy farmer-market quality tomatoes or cucumbers in winter, but the offer is not meeting the demand for now). Of course electricity isn't a problem, we're a leader in hydro-electrical development and the rates are 60% lower than in the rest of America. And we have huge surplus (with the ongoing crisis in the US, demand from the East Coast industry has gone down a lot). Political will alas still seems to be lacking for something really innovative. One party suggested massively lowering electrical rates for the farming sector so running greenhouses would be attractive, and give subventions for the building of those greenhouses, but it's a project from the fringes (socialists). The center left in power is also looking into ways to boost agriculture and stop importations from increasing as they did since the north american free trade agreements, but it isn't going that far.