Common Sense Things We Can Do To Decrease America’s Reliance On Oil (and Save a Few Bucks) (Part 10 of 10)

Buy Local

The organic food movement has changed the way American’s look at food. We no longer take for granted how produce in the supermarket was grown, the meat raised, and the prepackaged food put together. We read box labels and ingredient lists looking for unnecessary additives. We question where food came from. Seeing this, food companies identified the organic food niche and now market food as organically grown. Americans more then ever understand the saying ‘you are what you eat’.

There is another food movement that is as important and maybe even more relevant with today’s high gasoline prices. It is Buy Local. How far does food travel to get to your plate? Much of the food we see in our supermarkets, organic or not, comes from hundreds, even thousands of miles away, often spending days being trucked or flown from field to store. Transportation of food costs money, energy, and adds pollution to our ecosystem. Your local farmer’s market, community garden, food co-op, or seed savers group specializes in food grown locally. Some independently owned supermarkets supplement their stocks with locally grown food. Select restaurants (Charleston, Twin Cities) fill a niche by only preparing locally grown food. There is a name for people who buy and eat only locally grown food. Call them locavores.

There are many benefits to buying local. By cutting out the middle man, more money from the purchase of local food ends up in the farmer’s pocket and stays in the local economy. Local food systems encourage multiple cropping, in other words, growing multiple species and a wide variety of crops at the same time and same place, as opposed to the prevalent commercial practice of large-scale, single-crop farms. This encourages crop rotation, keeping the soil in better condition. More, smaller farms decrease the risk of a bio-terrorist attack crippling the entire nation’s food supply. That’s something even President Bush could get behind (maybe). Criticisms to the buy local food movement include loss of variety and availability year round. Local food proponents turn these negatives into positives by saying that local food translates to more variety because farmers are free to try small crop varieties and regional varieties. And by eating with the seasons, you eat foods when they are at their peak taste, and are the most abundant, and the least expensive. This is something our grandparents would appreciate.

The Buy Local movement can be applied to anything, not just food. How many goods do we get from half way around the world? Do we need them and can we Buy Local?