So those seemingly small choices that you make at the grocery store can end up making a big impact. Both for the planet at large, and your local community. Choices such as buying food as farm-direct as possible, shopping in season, and avoiding vendors and restaurants that you know source their food from conventional operations. Wanna know exactly how? Well, here are some examples to get us started:
Okay, so the local food movement challenges the larger, what we sometimes call "conventional" food industry, by redeveloping relationships between farmer, grocer and consumer, thus allowing control of the quality of foods to be returned to the consumer. This includes both the quality of the end product and the quality of the production method.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term "conventional," it refers to the practices involved in the production of food. At conventional farms, insecticides, chemical fertilizers and herbicides are used to control pest and weed populations and encourage fast and unnaturally large growth of fruit and vegetables. Similarly, in the conventional meat industry, growth hormones and medications are mixed in with animal feed in order to prevent disease during repeatedly stressful and sometimes unclean situations.
While the industry is regulated and most of the food comes out safe for consumption, it could be argued that conventional operations don't take animal welfare or environmental impact into consideration. For instance, year after year, big farms have continued to institute unnatural changes to their procedure, or even to the very seed they use, which makes mass food production possible, but leaves the land in a distressed state. In effect, it's a gross cycle, whereby such changes are a short-term answer to the land's inability to continue to generate a good crop. But the reason the land becomes tired and incapable in the first place is because of these very changes.
Small farms, however, generally reap a natural amount of product from basic and sustainable practices. Because smaller farms ask the land and the animals to only produce what they can come up with naturally, farmers are able to return to their land year after year after year with no major harm to the environment. Which is a system that just plain makes sense to support if you plan on having babies, have babies and/or generally like the idea of the continuance of life on earth (and by that I mean all life, not just human life).
Of course, on the issue of unnatural substances being put into our food, the land and therefore also the water table, it would seem that little explanation is needed. If you had the option of eating either a Ribeye from a cow who had been pumped full of antibiotics and hormones for ten of its eighteen months (which is how old conventional beef is when slaughtered), or a Ribeye from a cow that had only ever consumed food it foraged on open land for about three years, which one would you pick?
There is so much more that one could talk about to explain the benefits of eating locally and from small farmers, like: there are economic advantages to trading money within a single community; there's the transportation issue, and how many believe there is indeed a major ecological benefit to not transporting food long distances; there are other health issues, including the mistakes in the system in which conventional food is regulated. There is also the major and direct benefit to people who work on small farms, versus those that work on big, conventional farms. These benefits are both health- and pay-related, and I think you can guess why. If you can't guess, though, go here.
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