EAT LOCAL

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Eating food raised near your home is better for you, your community, and the planet.

Did the vegetables you enjoyed at dinner last night come from a farmstead in the next county—or from fields on the other side of the globe? If you’re not sure, join the club. Many consumers are in the dark when it comes to the source of their food, according to Betsy Barnum, director of the Great River Earth Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Minneapolis that seeks to promote local—not global—consumption.

Barnum is one of a growing number of consumers who are becoming conscious eaters, enjoying homegrown, locally produced foods whenever possible. It’s a way to get more closely connected with our environment and to take better care of it, explains Barnum.

“I belong to a community-supported farm eighty miles from where I live,” says Barnum. Like the other members, she gets a delivery of fresh vegetables—whatever is in season on the farm at that time—every week. Occasionally, the farm hosts gatherings where members come together to enjoy a potluck or a harvest celebration on the land. Plus she has an open invitation to help weed, cultivate, or harvest.

By being a member of a local farm, Barnum has learned a lot about how her food is grown and when produce is in season. “The very first delivery of the year includes lots of lettuce, spinach, and radishes,” she explains. In July, she’ll get to enjoy local strawberries.

Conscious eating

In recent decades, with readily available air freight and refrigeration, food has become a global commodity much like lumber or copper, according to Joan Dye Gussow, a nutrition professor at Columbia University and author of This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader, (Chelsea Green, 2000). But Gussow is not convinced the globalization of our food supply is a good thing.

“There are a significant number of people who are concerned about our food system,” notes Gussow, who says industrialized agriculture encourages monoculture planting of single crops and extensive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides—some of which are banned in the United States but still used abroad to grow food consumed in this country.

“Choosing foods grown in your local community that have minimal processing and packaging is better for both you and the environment,” Gussow notes. Among other things, “long-distance food requires an enormous amount of fossil fuel to ship it around.” Gussow prefers to eat food grown in conditions she can monitor as opposed to places where she has no idea of how the food is grown or how the field workers are treated.

Gussow, who grows much of her food in a small backyard garden in upstate New York, calls on consumers to “re-localize” their food choices. She urges them to purchase their food from farms within a day’s travel distance. Alternatively, she suggests spending at least $10 per week on local produce through farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture arrangements.