10 Reasons to Eat Local Food

Eating local means more for the local economy.  According to a study by the New Economics Foundation in London, a dollar spent locally generates twice as much income for the local economy.  When businesses are not owned locally, money leaves the community at every transaction.  (reference)

Locally grown produce is fresher.  While produce that is purchased in the supermarket or a big-box store has been in transit or cold-stored for days or weeks, produce that you purchase at your local farmer's market has often been picked within 24 hours of your purchase.  This freshness not only affects the taste of your food, but the nutritional value which declines with time.

Local food just plain tastes better.  Ever tried a tomato that was picked within 24 hours?  'Nuff said.

Locally grown fruits and vegetables have longer to ripen.  Because the produce will be handled less, locally grown fruit does not have to be "rugged" or to stand up to the rigors of shipping.  This means that you are going to be getting peaches so ripe that they fall apart as you eat them, figs that would have been smashed to bits if they were sold using traditional methods, and melons that were allowed to ripen until the last possible minute on the vine.

Eating local is better for air quality and pollution than eating organic.  In a March 2005 study by the journal Food Policy, it was found that the miles that organic food often travels to our plate creates environmental damage that outweighs the benefit of buying organic. (reference)

Buying local food keeps us in touch with the seasons.  By eating with the seasons, we are eating foods when they are at their peak taste, are the most abundant, and the least expensive.

Buying locally grown food is fodder for a wonderful story.  Whether it's the farmer who brings local apples to market or the baker who makes local bread, knowing part of the story about your food is such a powerful part of enjoying a meal. 

Eating local protects us from bio-terrorism.  Food with less distance to travel from farm to plate has less susceptibility to harmful contamination. (reference)

Local food translates to more variety.  When a farmer is producing food that will not travel a long distance, will have a shorter shelf life, and does not have a high-yield demand, the farmer is free to try small crops of various fruits and vegetables that would probably never make it to a large supermarket.  Supermarkets are interested in selling "Name brand" fruit: Romaine Lettuce, Red Delicious Apples, Russet Potatoes.  Local producers often play with their crops from year to year, trying out Little Gem Lettuce, Senshu Apples, and Chieftain Potatoes.

Supporting local providers supports responsible land development.  When you buy local, you give those with local open space - farms and pastures - an economic reason to stay open and undeveloped.

Download a printable version (pdf) of this guide.

Comments

[Liz]

I love every one of these reasons. It just makes so much sense to me to eat locally. Thanks so much for spearheading this effort, Jen.

[Tana Butler]

Hi, Jen,

I had to write TWO blog entries today, and will try to do a wrap-up for you on this tomorrow. I've been left to do solo childcare with a sick baby whose parents thought it would be more fun to go to Burning Man, and I'm having a hard time getting anything done.

But regarding my second blog entry, tag—I'd love to know more about you.

http://smallfarms.typepad.com/small_farms/2005/08/entry_2_for_tod.html

[jessy]

hi! i just found your blog, very interesting. of course i do agree with you on this one :-)

[Steve]

Good book on local food: Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket - http://www.worldwatch.org/pubs/books/17/

Other good Local Food resources: http://www.worldwatch.org/features/food/

[smooveJ]

Clearly, you're insane. Everyone knows the best ham comes from Spain. And have you ever tried eating a non-German bratwurst? Just because it's locally grown doesn't mean it's going to taste good. Just look at Kraft macaroni and cheese. That stuff is delicious and the Baby Jesus himself doesn't even know where it's made.

[smooveJ]

Oh and another thing - I hate to be the one to tell you this, but life actually begins at 0. If you're a Republican I guess you'd say life begins at -.75, but you wouldn't say it to me because I'd karate chop you in the neck for voting for a retarded monkey twice in a row.

[Asten]

jeez, some of you wacky liberals can't even take a nice, simple post about the pleasures of fresh food without taking a pointless partisan swipe. Pathetic.

[Michael Soron]

A superb post, Jen! It is enthusiastically appreciated. Your thoughtfulness and thoroughness in this post will prove tremendously useful in communicating the value of eating locally to friends, family, and coworkers. Continued success!

[Tana]

Hi, Jen,

I took a few pointed (not pointless) swipes at people who don't support local/seasonal food. I finally wrote up some thoughts on my participation in the Eat Local Challenge..

I think I will be holding on to my lessons for a long time. It's simply impossible to play ostrich and pretend not to know how important it is.

Thank you AGAIN, for all your clear writing and intelligent work. You are awesome.

[benjamin chapman]

cool stuff. keep up the good work. rare pieces questioned for a long time: http://www.joebridge.com/blog/index.php?p=31 , no proof of ideas

[leo]

I wouldn't dare eat anything that was grown near here. The water and soil are contaminated from refineries and generations of corruption. If you're so sure of your thesis then why don't you come to cancer alley, I mean Lousiana, and enjoy some fine food.

[George Papadopoulos]

I am a teacher in Greece. I'm making the plan of a project called "Local diet(Meditterannean for us), benefits for helth and also for the environment" a project for children 10-12 years old. The project I plan will be for a year. 2 hours a week. You can visit my blog and help us by giving some ideas of how we can make 25 to 30 activities. Your ideas are great.

[Enefola Ochimana Solmon]

All the above reasons are coorrect cos am working on a project eating habit eating local food is cheeper and readly available for all who love it. hygine rate is high cos you can identify the bad foods from the good ones

[Tom]

This website has launched recently which will certainly help local food producers: www.littlelocalfood.com

[Jerry Hinz]

If you would like to show your support for buying locally grown food, we have a line of "I'M A LOCAL HERO" apparel and merchadise at www. cafepress.com/buylocalorganic

[Pat]

Great list. I make a point of buying local products whenever I go on vacation as well. Always supporting the local community!

delightful post. One of the better reasoned critiques for eating local. Personally, I don't buy the whole organic mystique. Organic food and known organic food tastes basically the same to me. So if people want to spend extra money for food for psychological benefit, they're welcome to do it.

Here we are, early January up near Boston and the only local food we have are this fall's apples sitting in the fridge and a few plastic boxes full of tomatoes from the garden. Normally would have a lot more but unfortunately, we were savaged by woodchucks and lost everything except an anemic tomato crop. We killed one of the woodchucks and if we can find the holes for the other, we will kill that one too.

Your piece raises a fundamental point. Local food is extremely seasonal. In New England, you get very short-lived bursts of food tapering off in September when the last of your apples and potatoes are harvested. For the rest of the year, if it isn't stored, you go long distances for food. When I went shopping today and purchased a minimal amount of fresh food, I think the closest I purchased was lettuce from California. Eating locally, I would get lettuce for about four weeks out of the year and the rest of the year would be root vegetables, beans, and meat.

Maybe I am not into the community enough but I don't see any discussions all of how eating locally will change land use and food prices. Obviously, it will increase urbanization as people are forced off of potential farmland but it will also increase the cost of food because we will need to pay living wages plus some to get people to work on a farm. After all, would you give up your cushy job in an office somewhere to go work a really hard life that'll age you two years for every one and probably shorten your life span by 10 years? Think I'm kidding? Take a look at the pictures of pioneers. Talk about dried meat over a few bones.

A very important question is how much land is used for making food? One source on the net claims there is about two acres of land farmed for every person in the country. We can back our way into that number through a little math.

from http://ask.yahoo.com/20061123.html

""" The USDA has more tasty tidbits about our how our cravings add up over a year. In 2000, the average person ate 195 pounds of meat (red meat, poultry, and fish), 250 pounds of eggs, 593 pounds of dairy products, 74.5 pounds of fats, 200 pounds of flour and cereal products, and 707 pounds of fruits and vegetables."""

one acre of land can produce around 2000 pounds of fruits and vegetables. That means, for vegetables alone, you will need 1/2 to 3/4 acre per person just to cover their vegetable allotment (remember the vicious woodchucks). Everything else probably brings the total up to 2-3 acres per person for one year worth of food.

From these numbers here, you can start calculating all such an interesting "what if" scenarios. For example, if you had to grow food for a city of one million people, how many square miles of land you need? well, let's assume two acres per person, so that's 2 million acres of land needed and that according to Google calculator, works out to 3125 sq mi. My goodness, that's a lot of land. Rhode Island is 1440 sq mi so a rough rule of thumb is you would need three times the size of Rhode Island to feed one million people. Of course, assuming I did my sums correctly.

Another interesting stat is the storage area for food. Storing 770 pounds of fruits and vegetables (even in dried or preserve form) is a significant amount of storage space. Multiply that by a million people, and you are talking about acres of warehouses, drying, Canning, and freezing facilities that need to be replicated for every harvest area.

The politics of local food could also get rather nasty because if you are setting aside 3000 plus square miles of land for farming, it isn't going to be small family farms. It's going to be aggrabiz farms because there's money to be made and God damn it, they're going to make it because they can do it cheaper and faster than any small farm.

When you cut through all the numbers and potential social changes, you're going to end up with a society where you don't get to choose what you eat. You eat what's available. If there's no meat available, you eat vegetarian, if you've got no vegetables but only beans and rice and a hunk of beef, you eat beans and rice and a hunk of beef. All of our dietary affectations such as gourmands of McDonald's or anorexic well-to-do suburban vegetarians will be stripped away and you'll be faced with the reality your mother probably gave you when you were a small child, "eat what I serve you, or else what you don't eat will be all you get for breakfast." and believe me, we will all be thankful for whatever food we get when woodchucks, weather, drought, etc. devastate our local food supply the way it has for the past few years.

[Audrey]

Do you mind if we use variations of your list 10 Reasons to Eat Local Food in a local food directory we are putting together here in Sheridan, Wyoming? Thanks for getting back with us - love the list!

Audrey

[Jessica]

Just linked to you in my blog. Thanks for the great site!

Jessica
www.practicalnourishment.com

[nathalie]

I love this list - eating locally makes such an impact on the environment and on the consumer's personal health...not to mention it tastes better. i do agree with eating organic, however. i can see where we could disagree with store bought organic products, but eating organic produce (especially from your own backyard garden or local produce supplier) makes a huge differnce. think about all the pesticides and fertilizers that go into the ground that feed the fruits and vegetables that you then consume. It is a healthier and more environmentally conscious way to eat. It is a little trickier for those who eat meat: organic does NOT equal humane. I greatly encourage those of you who eat meat to find out where your meat comes from. It is incredibly important to be a responsible consumer and make sure that you are supporting ethical and humane actions. (I think that most of omnivores would abhor the thought of what actually happens to the animals before they enter the slaughterhouse - and then, of course, the actual happenings in the slaughterhouse) Anyway, eat local! make sure the cows you eat were grazing freely and not confined to a cage. And the same for your vegetables and fruit. Avoid consuming chemicals! Remember, you are what you eat!