5 Reasons to Eat Locally

The industrialization and globalization of food poses a range of threatening developments that we must actively address, not only for the earth’s health, but also for our own. Whether you grow your own or you buy your fresh food products through your local farmer’s market, the slow food movement is a powerful shift that aligns beautifully with the environmentally friendly tenets of LEED programming. If you’re somehow unconvinced, please keep reading!

Eating Locally: Important for the Following 5 Reasons:

Support Your Local Economy: when you purchase your food products from a nearby resource, it keeps your dollars local. This promotes regional self-reliance, product diversity and local innovation, all of which help to keep your community functional and vibrant.

Promotes Energy Conservation: Not only are you mitigating the immense transportation costs associated with industrialized agriculture, but you’re also actually reducing food waste. Fresher produce lasts longer in your fridge because the time between harvesting and being delivered to you, the consumer, is so much less. Did you know that 40% of all food gets thrown away in the US, according the Environmental Protection Agency? This equates to 33 million tons of landfill waste!

Tastes Better (Because It Is Better): The nutritional benefits of eating locally grown food are well documented. Among some of the primary benefits are that the nutritional value drops as time passes since being harvested, and smaller farms focus on peak harvesting as opposed to when it’s most financially lucrative in terms of packing and shipping. Consequently, the freshness is reflected in the taste. Likewise, smaller farms tend to use fewer chemicals, allowing the natural flavors to shine through.

Improved Diversity: Local farmers tend to produce a wider variety of goods, and more frequently “try” smaller crops of unique fruits and vegetables as a way of differentiating themselves. So while big agriculture focuses only on those mass market foods that will sell, small farmers think and grow outside of the box, allowing continued crop variety.

Transparency: Know where your food really comes from. When you purchase regionally produced foods, the mystery behind the processes involved in the product’s creation are more easily resolved. Instead of engendering the wild goose chase associated with the country-of-origin labeling (COOL), simply visit the farm or speak with the farmer directly to learn about the processes they use. Are they spraying pesticides? Do they use GMO seeds? What exactly are the livestock fed?

Looking for additional resources? There are literally tons! Michael Pollan’s collection of literature, including the Omnivore’s Dilemma,are well researched, compelling reads. Here’s a particularly persuasive book list from FoodTank.