The Perks of Being a Locavore

I love Spring! The opening of farmers markets is like Christmas for me. This morning, I visited the smaller weekday, downtown Farmers Market we have in town. For just $12, I came home with these great goodies.

Eggs are on of the main reasons I love when the market opens. I can occasionally find some around town in the winter, but it's not that often.

This afternoon my CSA box comes with kale, vitamin greens, collards, asparagus and strawberries. CSA is community-supported agriculture. For the one I am part of, I get a box of fruits and vegetables from a nearby organic farm delivered to a drop-off point in town. Sometimes, the farm will supplement with foods from other local farms who use sustainable farming practices.

With a CSA membership, you get whatever is being grown on the farm that week. I get notified on Saturday what's coming in my box on Wednesday. This time of year it's a lot of greens. They aren't my favorite, but I know I need to eat them. So this week I plan on feeding the family a lot of green smoothies.

In addition to buying produce local, I also get my meat from a local butcher. I ask about where the animals lived, what they ate, and what, if any, medications they were given. Plus, the meat I buy is always fresh. The butcher cuts up my meat when I call to place the order. There's no water or preservatives added, and it's never frozen. 

Why eat local?
I know you go to the grocery store and see all these inspections and seals of approval. Your local crops don't have that, but those seals really aren't protecting you that much (we won't go into that today). There are so many reasons to buy local. Here's a few.

You get to talk to the farmer. Do you want to know what's been sprayed on your strawberries? Or where the chickens that laid these eggs live? All you have to do is ask. Most farmers love talking about what they do. Getting that connection with where my food comes from is one of my favorite things about buying local, and it's a great lesson for the kids.

Fresh tastes better. The food you get was recently picked, which just tastes better than food that has been placed in cold storage and trucked from Argentina. Plus, with less time from farm to table, the food likely  has more nutrients.

Your food is likely less contaminated. OK, this point can definitely be argued. But, at the most basic level, the less time it takes to get from farm to table, the less needs to be done to your food. Your local farmer may still be using herbicides and pesticides and keeping animals in poor conditions. But your food isn't entering the large food distribution chain, where it can pass through many hands, opening up many opportunities for contamination.

You're helping your local economy and environment. Farming is becoming more difficult in the United States, but it's a vital service to keeping a healthy food supply. Farmers markets and CSAs help your local farmers stay in business. By keeping them in business, you're keeping that farmland in the hands of its owner and away from commercial development.

Ideally, you'd want to look for local growers that use organic or sustainable farming practices. That's where you get the healthiest foods and the best environmental impact.

Do you shop local? Are you excited about what's coming for spring?