the 100-mile diet
April 30th 2011 10:09
I wanted to spend a little more time elaborating on the diet change I briefly covered in my last post. As I stated, I wanted to focus my food purchases to local providers. This type of diet has several different names, one of which is the 100-mile diet, implying of course that all food is grown and sold within 100-miles of the consumer. The map above shows my particular 100-mile radius.
I stated before that some staples would still need to be purchased from the store, but I'd be doing some research to find out just how much variety of food I could get in my area.
There are many reasons to buy local, but here are a few of the reasons that really spoke to me personally, and drove me to decide to entrust a part of my every day diet to my local farmers:
1. Nutritional Value
Most of our food is transported from three different states: Washington, California, and Florida. This means a large majority of our food has to travel over a thousand miles to get to our local supermarket. This means our food is in transit, off the vine, for seven to fourteen days before it ends up sitting in your grocery store for however many days before it's purchased. The longer it takes for your food to get to your table, the more vitamins it loses, and the less nutritious it is.
On the flip-side of that, produce at your local farmers market, or produce stands has generally been harvested in the last 24 hours, so it's far more nutritious, and will probably taste much better as well.
It's also important to discuss industrially grown produce. Industrially grown fruits and veggies are developed to produce the max out-put per acre. This is achieved through a variety of means including selective breeding, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides. Studies have shown that over the last several decades, our supermarket foods have declined in essential minerals and vitamins. Aside from that, I can guarantee that the taste of those supermarket greens will not have the same taste as locally grown products.
2. Environmental Responsibility
Like I mentioned before, your food generally has to travel a long way to get to your plate. That's a lot of emissions, and as a result a lot of environmental damage. It's important not to fall victim to the seductive "organic" label. It can feel good to buy organic, but if you take a look at where your organic foods are coming from, you'll probably find that it isn't too close to home. This means it most likely caused more damage to the environment just getting to you than damage it prevented by being "organic".
3. Keeping Money in the Community
Local eating, even if it's just having dinner at a locally owned restaurant or opting out of the chain-store coffee and grabbing your fix at a local shop, puts money back into your community. Every time you shop at store or restaurant that isn't locally owned, your allowing more money to leave your community. This has a lot of consequences. You're encouraging nutritionally deficient produce, and voting against your local farmers.
All in all, There are a lot of advantages to eating locally, and the health benefits are one of the most appealing aspects to me. I've also talked about growing a small garden myself using my soon-to-be worm bed to produce my own fertilizer. The worms are still being located (seriously, I've never heard of a worm shortage, but it's making my search for worms very difficult), but I've tried growing a few green onions in my window sill just to see if I could:
I apologize about the terrible quality of photo but LOOK AT THAT. I don't think I've grown anything since I was in kindergarten. All I did was save the bulbs of a few green onions I used to make soup about a week ago and stuck them in some soil in a cup. Add water, stick in the window sill and wah-la! Fresh veggies. Obviously that's not going to make a meal, but it goes to show that there are a lot of ways to eat local, whether it's at the farmers market or your own backyard (or bedroom window ;] .
Visit me at mediablotch.com
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