Eating Locally

There are many advantages to eating a diet of in-season, locally grown food.

Gorgeous Tomatoes at the Farmer's Market by Jill Clardy, on Flickr

Supporting your local economy by purchasing from the farmers, growers, dairies and ranchers in your state, county or town keeps your food dollars at home supports your area and keeps it alive. Allowing a neighborhood to die and become blighted by sending jobs out of the community is a sad way to lose neighbors and friends.

Eating foods appropriate for the season and your location helps your body deal with the stresses and challenges that your own climate poses. Soft, tender, leafy greens turn bitter and run to seed when the weather gets hot. There is evidence that our bodies need the nutrients in those greens in the spring as a tonic between heavier winter foods and the heat of summer. Sure, grocery stores carry tomatoes year round now, but there is something special about that flavor in the heat of summer.

Consuming food within hours of harvest ensures the greatest amount of nutrients are being provided to your body, not wasted during shipment. Foods can be harvested at their peak of freshness and not picked green and exposed to gas to artificially ripen them. Honestly, I find the best reason to eat fresh-from-the-field is flavor. Nothing compares to a Juliet tomato still warm from the sun.

Conserving fuel and reducing emissions is a tricky proposition. I learned this week that those red bell peppers from Holland I was not purchasing use about 60% less oil to get to me by boat than the ones flown in from California (where most US-labeled organics are grown.) But neither Holland nor California can offer me the sweet spicy flavor or the higher vitamin C content of red bell peppers grown within a few miles of my own home.

Heirloom varieties of vegetables are becoming increasingly rare as large growers opt for shipment-stable varieties. Fewer of us have ever seen a pink tomato, purple carrot or brown bell pepper than ever before. By growing a wide variety of foods, your local farmer is enriching the local environment, preserving diversity and capturing a legacy for future generations. That amazing photo at the top of this post sure doesn’t look like the supermarket tomato table, does it?

Preserving our future by perpetuating the time-honored methods of small to medium scale farming, organic farming, family farming and gardening is something your local farmer may not get a lot of credit for. I think it is incredibly important that these methods be kept alive for future generations. If we permit the local, small farmer to become a relic of history, we will lose a vital link to our own self-sufficiency that at some point in the future, might well save our lives. And most farmers are more than willing to sit and discuss their methods with anyone interested, giving help and guidance to other farmers and backyard gardeners alike.

These are all arguments you’ve likely heard before. It is the last day of June as I write this, and farmer’s markets all over the US are in full swing. Please, set aside a percentage of your grocery fund this week  to take to your local farmer’s market. Ask about what you see there. Talk to the farmers, dairy people and meat growers. Find out where they do their work, how they manage their farms and what they are doing to support your local economy. Visit the market’s tent and find out if they are producers-only (no resellers allowed), if they take food stamps, what other projects they support. Take your time and browse and talk. It might seem time consuming and overwhelming at first, but it is so worth the effort.

If you don’t know where to find your local farmer’s market, start here: Local Harvest

This post is part of the Natural Cures blog carnival, hosted by Hartkeisonline.