Buying Local: Good for Your Health and Your Community

Buying your food products at a local farmers market is a win-win situation for you, your community, our local farmers and even the environment itself. Here are some good reasons you should consider buying more locally produced foods and goods.

Exceptional taste and freshness

Local food is fresher and tastes better than food shipped long distances. Local farmers can offer varieties bred for taste and freshness rather than for shipping and long shelf life. When you buy produce from the supermarket, it has typically been picked at least 4 to 7 days before being placed on the shelf, and is transported an average of 1500 miles. When produce is imported from other countries, the time and distance are significantly longer.

Support endangered family farms

There's never been a more critical time to support your farming neighbors. With each local food purchase, you ensure that more of the money you spend on food goes to the farmer. Estimates say that farmers only receive between 10 to 18 cents of every dollar that you spend for retail produce. When you buy direct, you are helping to provide an opportunity for farming families to continue the work they love. Farming is a time-honored way of life. By buying locally, you help preserve this connection with nature, insight into weather, the seasons, and the miracle of raising food.

Knowing where your food comes from and how it is grown enables you to choose safe food from farmers who avoid or reduce their use of chemicals, pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, or genetically modified seed in their operations. Recent news stories, such as e-Coli outbreaks and genetically modified crops, highlight the importance of knowing what happens to your food before it reaches your table.

Buying local is good for the environment

How far your food travels impacts your health and the environment. Transporting foods from industrial farms to supermarkets produce travels several days and anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 miles to get to market, losing vital nutrients and freshness and adding carbon dioxide to the environment with the travel. Buying locally minimizes energy used in food production, transport and storage, which in turn minimizes harm to the environment. Between 20 and 30 percent of the global warming caused by human activity is contributed by food and agriculture systems. Reducing the distance food travels from producer to your table brings measurable improvements in greenhouse-gas emissions and positive effects on climate.

Local food benefits your community and your pocketbook

Buying local reinvigorates local economies by keeping money re-circulating through the community, creating new jobs, and boosting farmers’ incomes. Within the system of industrial agriculture, chain supermarkets are people’s primary access to healthful foods. In many urban areas, supermarkets first pushed out independently run markets and then abandoned the community for more lucrative suburban markets, leaving residents with no other option than convenience stores and fast food chains.

Today farmers receive an average of less than 10 cents of every dollar spent on food. The rest of the money goes to processing, packing, and distribution. At farmers markets, on the other hand, 90 percent of the profits go straight to the farmers.   Buying local cuts out the need for middleman, and eliminates the costs of food associated with packaging and distribution. One survey showed that local food sold through a delivery scheme cost an average of 30 to 40 percent less than similar foods purchased in supermarkets.

Buying local foods also gives consumers more say in what types of foods are available to them. Instead of having products mandated by multinational corporations, communities can choose to produce foods that are regionally and culturally desirable.   When food does not have to travel far from farm to plate, it can be harvested at the peak of ripeness. Produce that has a long journey ahead of it is generally picked before it is fully matured. Commercial tomatoes, for instance, often are harvested when they are still green and then ripened through controlled exposure to ethylene gas.

Eating local is fun, too

According to Homegrown, a report on local eating by Brian Halweil, sociologists say that people have 10 times more conversations in farmers markets than at grocery stores. Make friends with farmers and you can build community and your knowledge about where your food is coming from and how the farmers grew it.

How to get started

You can start supporting local agriculture today:

• Visit your local farmers market.

  Start by buying more of your foods from a local farmers market, such as Memphis Farmers Market.

• Join a CSA.

  Community Supported Agriculture takes place on farms that offer seasonal shares in their harvests. You pay up front, and then receive a weekly box of freshly picked produce.. An important part of eating locally is tailoring your diet to eating foods that are seasonally available.Visit our CSA page to find out more.

• Learn more online.

  We recommend Eat Local Challenge, 100 Mile Diet: Local Eating for Global Change, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Eat Local page. Visit the US CDC website, www.fruitsandveggiesmatter.gov to learn about the benefits of fruits and veggies, get recipes, and more. These sites offer lots of getting started info and tips for becoming a “localvore.”

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