Getting Ready for Earth Day: Eat Local Food
by Collin Dunn, Corvallis, OR, USA on 04. 4.07
When it comes to learning more & doing more to make your life greener and getting ready for Earth Day, the choices you make in the food you eat every day can make a tremendous impact. There are lots of food choices that you can make that are better than pesticide-laden conventional, hormone-injected factory-farmed food; today we'll concentrate on a few of the benefits and strategies for eating local.
1) Why eat local? We partnered up with EarthTalk to explain the ins and outs of the environmental benefits of eating local.
2) Here are 10 more reasons to eat local along with a handy PDF for easy printing and distribution.
3) Local Harvest is one of the most comprehensive, complete resources for find local food near you.
4) One of the difficulties of eating local is dealing with the changing seasons (and generally smaller harvests in winter) but it's possible to eat local all year 'round.
5) Among its many benefits, local food is more nutritious, even in the winter.
6) Local food is becoming big enough that it was even featured on the cover of Time magazine.
7) If finding time to get to the farmer's market each week proves difficult, joining a community supported agriculture (CSA) co-op like this one is a good alternative.
8) Eating local food can seem restrictive in terms of ingredients, but there are good examples of local food menus that can make a seemingly small amount of choices go further.
To learn more about making Earth Day-friendly food choices, check out our How to Green Your Meals guide and stay tuned for more tips as the big day approaches.
I'm curious about your first point. It claims that it will link to an article explaining the 'ins and outs' of eating locally. However the article seems to only discuss what the authors obviously believe to be the ins.
Have you done any research on how eating locally might affect the economies of developing nations? I would be very interested to see an article that describes how eating locally might affect global communities.
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editor note: That's a very interesting topic. We haven't covered it much yet, but from what I know, what affects most the agriculture of developing nations are all the subsidies in the first world (driving down prices, increasing volumes, then first world countries go dump surpluses in third world, etc), not so much the people eating locally.
One of the best ways people can support healthy/fresh/local food is to get involved in the debate over the 2007 Farm Bill. I am proud to be working with a coalition of 400 groups called the Farm and Food Policy Project. If you want to send a message to Congress at this critical moment before the Ag Committees create their bill, go to www.healthyfarmbill.org
thanks
Anthony