Buying your food locally is good for your health, your environment and your community. Simply put, buying local means to buy food produced, grown or raised as close to your home as possible. In the past ten years, the number of farmer's markets has more than doubled, while the sales of organic produce has nearly increased 20% each year in the last decade.
Local food is fresher and tastes better than food shipped from other countries or states. Local food is hundreds or even thousands of miles fresher and fresher foods make for better tasting foods. Fruits and vegetables shipped in from distant states or countries can take one to two weeks before they arrive in the supermarket. As a result, food is less fresh and contains fewer nutrients. In order to increase shelf-life for lengthy transport, foods are treated with preservatives, grown with pesticides and even subjected to irradiation. Locally grown fruits and vegetables are usually sold within 24 hours of being harvested. Produce picked and eaten at the height of ripeness has exceptional flavor and when handled properly, is packed with nutrients. The best tasting food ripens close to home.
Local food doesn't have to travel far. This reduces carbon dioxide emissions and packing materials. Buying local food also helps to make farming more profitable and selling farmland for development less attractive. Buying local food helps to reduce dependence on foreign oil needed to ship food thousands of miles, thus cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions. Small, local farms are generally more environmentally friendly than large-scale industrial agriculture operations. Small family farms tend to utilize sustainable farming techniques, often raising organic products without pesticides and other harmful chemicals.
Buying local food keeps your dollars circulating in your community. This ensures that family farms in your community will continue to thrive. Supporting local farms can help to create jobs for your region. By supporting local agriculture, you help to protect your areas farmland from development. Protection of local farmland means protection of open spaces, natural ecosystems and biodiversity. Ninety-one cents of each dollar spent at traditional food markets goes to suppliers, processors, middlemen, and marketers; only 9-cents of each dollar actually go to the farmer.
Eating local is the easiest way to eliminate suspect food from your diet. It's also the easiest way to cut processed foods with added fat and sugar out of your diet, since you'll be buying more fresh fruits and vegetables. Or possibly you will grow your own. Again and again, taste tests prove that local, fresh foods simply taste better than their industrial counterparts.
