Seeds

Local Food: Wise Choices for People and the Planet

From The Local Harvest 2006.

If there was one simple thing that you could do to support the local economy, protect the environment and improve your health, wouldn’t you do it? Well you can! We all can — by choosing local food.

Enjoy tastier, healthier food

Fresh food, eaten at the height of ripeness has exceptional flavour — taste a freshly picked tomato and you’ll experience this first–hand.
The longer unprocessed food is stored, the lower its nutritional content. Food shipped long distances can spend weeks in transit and storage before being sold, while local food is often sold within 24 hours of harvest.
Local farmers offer varieties bred for taste and freshness, rather than to withstand long–distance travel and extended shelf life. By choosing locally produced food, you pay for taste and nutrition, not transportation and packaging.

Support family farms and the local economy

Family farms* are an important part of the Canadian tradition. However, Canadian farmers are a vanishing breed, and it’s no wonder — selling prices are at historic lows, often below the cost of production.
Small–scale farmers who sell directly to local eaters get full retail price for their products, giving them autonomy from agribusinesses and some measure of price certainty.
Eating from Kingston’s countryside strengthens the local economy by keeping our dollars circulating in our community.

Build a vibrant community

By choosing locally produced food, eaters and farmers have an opportunity to get to know one another in a way that builds real relationships based on direct knowledge and trust — the foundation of strong communities.
Such connections also lead to a more diverse and localized food system. Bakeries, artisan cheese making, and canneries flourish in such communities. In turn, networks form to promote community development and affect change locally and globally.

Slow down and feel the land

By buying directly from local farmers, we are re–establishing a time–honoured connection between the eater and the grower. Eating local food connects us more directly with the seasons, the weather, and the miraculous circle of life that sustains us all.

Promote food security and sovereignty

“Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” (World Food Summit, 1996)
Food sovereignty refers to the “right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture,” in contrast to having food largely controlled by international market forces (Via Campesina, 2002).
Food security and sovereignty identify human beings, rather than corporate interests, as the central concern of agriculture. By supporting sustainable food networks locally, we are building a more secure and sovereign food system.

Nurture the soil, plants, and animals

Large–scale industrialized farms are distinguished by monoculture — many acres of one type of crop or animal. Animals are reduced to “units” of a system, and subject to the rules of efficiency. There is pressure to compromise space, feed quality, and overall humane treatment to minimize cost and maximize profit.
Small–scale family farms are often patchworks of cultivated, fallow, and wild land, creating an independent system. Animals have access to the outdoors and are free to carry out their natural behaviours, such as rooting, pecking, and grazing.
A well–managed family farm is a place where the long–term health of all beings, the soil, water, and air is valued. Eating from Kingston’s countryside helps to nurture vital ecosystems.

Preserve biodiversity

Biological diversity refers to the variety of all forms of life, including species, genes, habitats, biological communities, and ecological processes. This interdependence is essential for the longevity of life on our planet.
In the modern industrial agricultural system, varieties are chosen for the greatest yield, uniformity, and for their ability to withstand industrial harvesting equipment, packing, and shipping.
By contrast, most small-scale farmers grow many varieties and species, striving to work with the bounty of nature rather than against it. It is common to see the use of several breeds of cattle, a variety of heirloom plant species from saved seeds, hedgerows, forested areas, and crop rotation. Consequently, biodiversity is often promoted and preserved more effectively.

Protect the environment

Vast amounts of greenhouse gases are produced in transporting food across our continent and around the world (each meal travels an estimated 2,500 km). It follows then that we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by eating locally.
Small-scale family farms are also less likely to use chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides (all of which are damaging to the environment and human health). When you buy directly from the farmer, you can ask about farm practices and/or visit the farm to see how your food is grown.
Supporting local small–scale farms enables farmers to be better stewards of our environment — preserving fertile farmland.

Celebrate our region and its bounty

To live bioregionally is to live with greater awareness of the local ecology, steeped in the natural history of the place and committed to making choices that help to balance human activity with the carrying capacity of the ecosystem.
By choosing local food, we are making connections between the food, the land (soil, plants, and animals) and the people who produce it. These connections lead to a recognition that our bioregion has an amazing capacity to provide for much of our food needs.

Create a sustainable legacy

By choosing more local food for ourselves and our families, we are consciously working to create a positive future for our children’s children that includes healthy food produced on small–scale farms for many years. We are part of a global movement to create sustainable food systems, in balance with nature, for generations to come.

Compiled from various sources by the NFU Local 316 Feast of Fields Education Team.