Tip # 7: When you can’t grow your own, a great way to ensure that you and your family have the freshest produce and smallest carbon footprint is to buy from local farmers, producers and merchants. A local farmer’s market is typically a great place to buy fruits and veggies…just be sure to choose the really local goods, ie not the Romaine wrapped in plastic that you can find at your grocery store.
Typical big-box supermarkets and super stores feature produce that has most often been: shipped thousands of miles, quick-frozen, wrapped in plastic, mass produced or genetically modified. Even if the produce isn’t organic, it’s typically better to buy local and fresh than produce that’s been shipped from far away. Just try to avoid the conventionally grown Dirty Dozen. Aside from harming Mother Earth, ingesting food products on a steady basis treated with: pesticides, chemical fertilizers, antibiotics and growth hormones can’t be good for our bodies.
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This is half the story. When things can be grown locally in an environmentally sustainable way that respects the carrying capacity of the planet, then local is the way to go. But if local means monocropping, high density planting, and compromising biodiversity just for the sake of being local, then it is solely about making the farmer more money. Period.
For an alternative take on the issue check out this New Yorker article ‘Big Foot’ http://nyr.kr/LXUOR. You’ll find out that roses shipped to England from Holland have a larger carbon footprint than roses from Kenya. And a New Yorker can drink a bottle of wine shipped from France with a cleaner conscience than if it’s trucked from California. The reality is that globalization doesn’t have to be a bad thing…small sustainable farms the world over can be supported with modern transport systems that don’t cause nearly as much environmental damage as many crop growing practices do.