Eating Local Food

Gretchen sent me a link to 100 Mile Diet — Local Eating for Global Change.

The average American eats food that travels many hundreds of miles. Fish and out of season fruit and veggies often travel from another hemisphere. Eating locally will reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. How do we go about it?

I haven’t posted on this subject before because northern California abounds in local produce all year; it’s easy for us to eat locally. But the 100 Mile Diet people live in Vancouver and are shifting local consumption patterns as they shift their own.

How is eating locally where you live? What makes it easier?

You are walking or bicycling to purchase local food, right?

One Response to “Eating Local Food”

  1. Gail Eastwood says:

    We grow a lot of our fruits and vegetables, as well as keeping goats and chickens for eggs and dairy products. This is a huge commitment of time. I compost the animal bedding and manure, and add very little else to my garden. There is also a commitment to eating what’s in season. This is easy in the summer, when the produce is abundant, and more spartan in the winter, when we’re down to winter squash, beets, and kale, kale, kale, and not much else. (Mushrooms, and canned tomatoes, but I don’t enjoy canning, so not so much canned stuff.) We live in a rural area, but the amount of veggies we grow would fit on many suburban lots, growing intensively in raised beds as we do. Remember the victory gardens of World War II? (Oh yeah, and rationed gasoline, this country used to be capable of rationing things in short supply…now we can’t even lower the speed limit.)

    OK I buy carrots, and I buy oranges, all winter. Carrots defeat me in this clay soil, and oranges don’t grow in that “l00 mile” radius. Haven’t yet convinced the family to substitute the kiwis, another good vitamin C source for keeping healthy in the cold dark time. And we buy a good number of other things not grown or raised here, the holiday table is full of them, plus daily staples like black tea, and salt mined from Utah or some such place. Last year I ordered a 20 pound bag of black beans, and it turned out to be certified organic produce–from China!!

    I think about this a lot, and have done so for years. There are so many details to attend to