What Does Eating Locally Mean to You—and to the World?
Yesterday, I wrote about how much fun I have cooking and eating local organic food—and how it’s not uncommon for 80 percent of our dinners to be grown within a few miles of our house.
Today, I want to talk about what local organic food means personally, and to the planet.
For me:
- Food that’s fun to cook and delicious to eat
- Super-fresh, and loaded with nutrition, vitamins, and minerals (instead of toxic chemicals)
- Very frugal
- Children who feel a direct connection to where their food comes from and how it grows—and who have carried their food awareness into their own lives in big cities, now that they’re grown
- Community; we always see friends when we pick up our share at the CSA farm, and they have educational programs like herb walks or food preservation workshops, potlucks and concerts once in a while
As an example of the dollars and cents, consider the six-flat of tomato plants we bought. I think we paid $3—so 50 cents per plant. Let’s amortize the fixed costs of the garden across all the crops, and add another $3 to cover the tomatoes’ share. So we’re up to $6.
Fresh local organic tomatoes are usually around $3 per pound at the local farmers markets—so we break even on the second pound. This is a slow year; we’re only getting about a dozen tomatoes a week, perhaps four pounds. Some years we get more like 40 pounds a week. But even with this year’s limited crop, that means we’re pulling in $120 worth over a ten-week harvest season, and in a good year, that number is more like $1200. And that’s just one crop; we’re also growing broccoli, green beans, kidney beans, eggplant, kale, onions, basil, rosemary, cucumbers, zucchini, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, and peas (earlier in the year). The whole garden costs us less than $100 for the year.
We split the $600 CSA membership with another family, and we collect our share for about 23 weeks, typically getting 10-20 pounds of organic produce per week—or roughly 345 pounds for the year. If the stores averaged even $4 per pound (they’re often higher for organic), that means our $300 has turned into $1380—not bad!
Saving so much money on our local organic produce lets us justify the expense of the locally produced food craft items at the farmers markets; the cheeses and eggs are quite a bit more expensive than the industrial versions in supermarkets. But it’s worth it, because they taste so much better, feel so much better in our bodies, and help our local organic farmers stay in farming. And with those foods, a little goes a long way; $10 or $20 a week gives us all we need.
The Planet:
Now, let’s look at what my food lifestyle means to the economy and ecology of my town, and the whole country:
- Very low carbon footprint. Instead of being shipped across the country, our food is hand-carried about 100 feet from our garden to our kitchen, or brought three miles (five kilometers) from the CSA farm either by car or bicycle. Instead of requiring huge inputs of petrochemicals and petrolabor, we work our garden by hand, except for the initial rototilling. And as vegetarians, our carbon footprint is much lower than if we ate meat (it would be lower still if we went vegan).
- Chemical-free. No health effects from pesticides and herbicides—to me and those who share my table, or to the farmers who grow it. AND no harmful effects to the soil and the water.
- Good for the local economy. Our farm membership fee and the dollars we spend on local dairy products, bread, and fruit stay in the community, instead of being siphoned off by a dozen middlemen and into the coffers of far-away corporations.
- Good for farmland. Every farmer that sells food to us is a farmer who is keeping the land in agriculture instead of selling that land off for development—and every successful local organic farm is a living lesson to other farmers that they don’t need to douse the earth (and their customers’ bodies) with poisons.
Pretty cool!
Now it’s Your Turn:
Please leave a comment about how you’ve incorporated (or will start incorporating) local artisan foods into your lifestyle. How are local organic foods making a difference to you?
Still need ideas? Tomorrow’s blog will provide concrete steps you can take to green your food, even if you live in a city. I do have to warn you though: once you’ve tasted REAL food, you won’t ever be satisfied by the poor imitations that dominate the industrial food system.
