Do You Buy Local Food?
Tomatoes at the farmers' market. Photo credit: Alex Van Buren
The push to buy locally grown food is nothing new. Even frigid Alaska, which imports about 95 percent of its comestibles thanks to that less-than-ideal growing climate, is jumping on the bandwagon with the aid of a new state program, according to a recent New York Times story.
But in a nation where almost everything Americans eat has traveled hundreds (and more often thousands) of miles, it’s worth a quick look at why its fans are such vocal proponents of buying local— whether at a vast farmers market or at a one-woman, side-of-the-road farm stand.
We asked Gabrielle Langholtz, editor of Edible Manhattan and author of “The New Greenmarket Cookbook" to share five of her biggest reasons to go local:
It’s More Delicious
"Tree-ripened fruit that could never make a trip across country tastes amazing," says Langholtz. The stuff that gets shipped around the world has got to last long enough to finally make it to supermarket shelves, says Langholtz, which means fruits are often picked green, then gassed with ethylene, to induce artificial ripening. “Small wonder most Americans don’t eat our daily servings of fruits and vegetables,” she says. “We’ve lost our appetite for this tasteless stuff.”
It’s Better for the Environment
Langholtz classifies this as a no-brainer: “When food travels a short distance from farm to eater — like, from a local farm, to a farmers market—it’s going to be fresher, and its transportation will burn less fossil fuels.”
It Helps Farmers
Since giant corporations produce much of the produce, dairy, and meat sold to grocery chains, the individual farmer simply can’t keep up. “Increasingly, these little operations… are unable to find profitable places to sell,” explains Langholtz. “Good luck selling a few acres’ worth of tomatoes or peaches in a global wholesale system that doesn’t care about quality anyway.”
You’ll Get Great Customer Service
Got questions? Need a recipe idea? Have a special request? A farmer selling at the market can usually help you on the spot. Once you start shopping locally, you get to know your purveyors and they get to know you. “It’s like, ‘Oh Claudia grows these amazing beans every summer and she knows I love them,” says Langholtz. “You can actually have a relationship with your farmer that you can’t get when something has gone through 10 middlemen.”
You’ll Find Way Cooler Stuff
"When eaters turn back the clock a few decades and start buying not from a few giant conglomerates but instead from small family farms in their own region, they discover amazing ingredients … crops you might never even encounter in supermarkets," according to Langholtz. Think: heirloom bean varieties and ground cherries. And don’t forget wild foods like nettles, ramps, and elderberries, picked from nearby fields and forests you may not even realize are there.
And how about you? How often do you buy local? Tell us in the comments.
