Eating Locally Why Eat Locally? Why Participate

Eating Locally

Why eat locally? Why participate in the locavore movement? The locavore movement is a movement in which one's carbon footprint is reduced by eating food grown near one's home. The point of this paper is quite simple and straight forward: eating locally means reducing your carbon footprint because what you ate last night for dinner did not travel 1,500 miles -- or even 200 miles -- and hence, fossil fuels were not used in the transport of that food. This paper points to the advantages of eating locally from a person perspective, with a brief mention of why reducing one's carbon footprint is desirable in an over-heated world.

Global Warming -- Carbon Footprints

There are still people who are in denial about climate change -- including some elected officials, including United States Senator Tom Colburn, a Republican representing Oklahoma. According to Climate Progress, 161 members of the U.S. Congress are in denial as to climate change (Germain, et al.). But meanwhile the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued their latest report in 2013 and their findings are specific: a) each of the last 3 decades has been "successively warmer" than any preceding decade dating back to 1850; b) sea levels have risen more since the mid-19th century than during the preceding 200 years; and c) emissions of greenhouse gases (containing massive amounts of carbon) are caused by humans (IPCC, 2013). I trust the scientists in the IPCC (from 120 different countries), and I try to reduce my carbon footprint by walking or riding a bike instead of driving my car, whenever possible and practical, and by eating fresh produce from our local farmer's market. I also try to avoid foods that have been genetically altered -- and I don't buy anything from corporations that alter food genetically.

My Personal History and Eating Locally

Having been raised in a minister's family with 7 children, I know a little bit about preparing, serving, and eating food, because all the kids in our family were required to take part in the meal preparation and the clean up afterwards. But we did more than that. We grew much of our own food. The church where my dad preached was a small congregation and he did not receive a big salary. But the church provided a "parsonage" (house) for our family (free) and they provided our family with three big gardens in which to grow our own food. So we not only ate "locally," we ate food from our neighborhood -- indeed, from behind our house.

We weren't doing that to reduce our carbon footprint at all. When I was a kid there was no talk about global climate change, but in our family we were certainly thrifty and we ate healthy foods for sure. The older children in our family helped dad plow the ground in the gardens and plant the seeds. We planted potatoes, squash, beets, corn, carrots, lima beans, tomatoes, string beans, lettuce, onions, turnips, broccoli and cauliflower. That sounds like a lot of food, and it was, but feeding seven kids takes a lot of food.

But the church also provided my family with two big lockers at a local freezer plant, so when harvest time came, my mom froze corn, beans, broccoli, carrots, strawberries (a farmer in my dad's congregation had a huge strawberry patch and invited us to pick what we needed), some squash, and cauliflower. And she canned tomatoes and beets. It was very cold in Wisconsin in the winters so a neighbor who was a member of dad's church had a "root cellar" and we used that to preserve potatoes, turnips, carrots and beets as well.

Today, many years later, I am a regular shopper at two farmer's markets. One of the markets meets on Fridays and the other (in a nearby town) has a regular Saturday session. Farmers bring an abundant variety of fresh produce (everything from squash to strawberries) and the local citizenry shows up in large numbers to do their weekly produce shopping. A local restaurant grills locally-grown chickens and beef as part of the farmer's market, but I have been cutting back on eating meat so I usually avoid buying their cooked foods. One of the booths at the local farmer's market serves different vegetable soups each Friday (from local produce vendors) that are absolutely delicious; my only problem is that sometimes the soups are too spicy for me, but otherwise I can make a meal out of a big serving of vegetable soup with a couple slices of home-made bread also purchased at the farmer's market. I buy seafood from a nearby purveyor whose fishing boats catch rock fish and deliver daily to the grocery store down the street.

All that said, I have to admit that I do buy breakfast cereal at the local supermarket and it certainly isn't produced locally. In fact I'm not sure that the cereals I like (oats and wheat) are free of genetically engineered products. It is worth mentioning that we had a citizen-written proposition on the ballot during the last presidential election (2012) that would have required food manufacturers to print food facts on the packaging so consumers would know what was in the food, but it didn't get enough votes to pass. So we will try again. We lost because the big corporations that have factory farms and utilize genetically engineered food spent millions scaring people into believing that the cost of their food would go way up if the proposition passed. Corporate supermarket chains also attacked the proposition.