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McHenry County Farmland Preservation Alliance

Twelve Reasons to Buy (& Eat) Local:
by Jennifer Maiser

Locally grown food tastes better. Food grown and sold locally is crisp, sweet, and loaded with flavor because it is picked less than 2 days before it reaches your hands. Produce flown or trucked in from California or Chile spends a week or longer in transition from field to plate, enough time for sugars to turn to starches, plant cells to shrink, and produce to lose vitality.

Local produce is better for your health. Studies show that fresh produce loses nutrients quickly once harvested. Food that is frozen or canned soon after harvest is more nutritious than "fresh" produce that spends a week on a truck or supermarket shelf. Locally grown food, purchased soon after harvest, retains its nutrients.

Locally grown fruits and vegetables have longer to ripen. Because the produce will be handled less, locally grown fruit does not have to be "rugged" or to stand up to the rigors of shipping.  This means that you are going to be getting peaches so ripe that they fall apart as you eat them, figs that would have been smashed to bits if they were sold using traditional methods, and melons that were allowed to ripen until the last possible minute on the vine.

Local food means more variety.  When a farmer is producing food that will not travel a long distance, will have a shorter shelf life, and does not have a high-yield demand, the farmer is free to try small crops of various fruits and vegetables that would probably never make it to a large supermarket.  Supermarkets are interested in selling "Name brand" fruit: Romaine Lettuce, Red Delicious Apples, Russet Potatoes. Local producers often play with their crops from year to year, trying out Little Gem Lettuce, Senshu Apples, and Chieftain Potatoes. This variety provides a harvest all season long, an array of brilliant colors and flavors, as well as preserves the genetic material from hundreds of years of human selection.

Local food supports local farm families. Direct markets, selling directly to consumers, cut out the middleman allowing local farmers to receive the full retail price for their food. With commodity prices at historic lows and farmers getting less than 10 cents of the retail food dollar, supporting local farms mean that farm families can afford to stay on the farm, doing the work they love.

Eating local means more for the local economy.  According to a study by the New Economics Foundation in London, a dollar spent locally generates twice as much income for the local economy.  When businesses are not owned locally, money leaves the community at every transaction.  (reference)

Supporting local providers supports responsible land development. When you buy local, you give those with local open space - farms and pastures - an economic reason to stay open and undeveloped. Lush fields of crops, meadows of wildflowers, and wild open landscapes will survive only as long as farms are financially viable. When you buy locally grown food, you are doing something proactive about preserving the agricultural landscape.

Local food keeps your taxes in check. Farms contribute more in taxes than they require in services, as opposed to suburban development. On average, for every $1 in revenue raised by residential development, governments must spend $1.17 on services, requiring higher taxes of all taxpayers. For each dollar of revenue raised by farm, forest, or open space, governments spend 34 cents on services.

Local food supports a clean environment and benefits wildlife. A well-managed family farm is a place where the resources of fertile soil and clean water are valued and diversity is welcomed. The habitat of a farm, with fields, meadows, woods, ponds and buildings, is the perfect environment for many species of wildlife, including bluebirds, killdeer, herons, bats, and rabbits.

Eating local is better for air quality and produces less pollution. The average bite of food someone eats in America has traveled 2000 miles before reaching the consumer’s plate. The environmental costs in terms of gasoline used for transport and pollution emissions from transport vehicles, are much higher than those associated with local food. Additionally, there appears to be an overall environmental advantage to buying local rather than buying organic foods that have been transported a long distance. In a March 2005 study by the journal Food Policy, it was found that the miles that organic food often travels to our plate creates environmental damage that outweighs the benefit of buying organic.

Eating local is homeland security.  Food with less distance to travel from farm to plate has less susceptibility to harmful contamination by terrorists. For example, sixty percent of the apple juice sold in the US is imported from China, traveling thousands of miles, and passing through dozens of hands before reaching your refrigerator.

Local food is about the future. By supporting local farmers today, you are helping to ensure that future generations will have access to nourishing, flavorful, abundant, farm fresh food.