How to take action- Late spring through fall, you can shop at local farmers' markets. Markets are opportunities to meet growers, learn where your food comes from, meet your community, and even make connections for larger purchases if you want to put food up for winter. Some areas have winter markets as well, offering winter squashes, onions, garlic, root vegetables, and apples, as well as preserves and dried foods. If your region doesn't have a farmers' market, consider .
- Join a CSA. A Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) system supports farmers by having people buy a share in their produce at the beginning of the season in exchange for deliveries of fresh produce throughout the growing season. The share price provides farmers with money in the spring when they need to buy seeds and other supplies, but don't have a lot of farm income. Each CSA has its own character and mode of functioning, and some offer opportunities to visit the farm and meet the other members. To find a CSA near you, talk to farmers at your local farmers' market, do some internet research, or contact farming networks or organisations.
- Many grocery stores carry local fruits, vegetables and food products in season. Ask your retailers what they have that is local and let them know this is important to you. Talking to retailers is one of the best ways to encourage them to sell local items.
- The most local food you can eat is what you grow yourself. Even if you have limited space, all you need is sunny windowsill for a few herbs, or put some containers on a small porch to grow a tomato plant, few strawberries, a berry bush, or some climbing beans. Read the Grow Some Food tip to get some gardening inspiration.
- Even in places with a winter farmers' market, eating locally is far more challenging and limited in the winter and early spring. In order to maintain a variety of local foods in your diet year round, stock up in the fall on foods that can be stored for a few months, such as carrots, beets, potatoes, squashes, nuts, garlic, peas, beans, and apples. Throughout the summer, you can preserve foods by freezing, canning and drying, so you can enjoy delicious local fare all winter.
Why it makes a difference- The distance food is shipped to consumers is often referred to as food miles. Most estimates state that on average food travels between 2,400 km to 3,200 km (1,500 to 2,000 miles) from where it is produced to reach the consumer. Travelling such distances gives your foods a great big carbon footprint.
- The environmental impacts from shipping, packaging and growing food in large-scale monocultures include increased carbon emissions and packaging waste, reduced biodiversity and often more energy and pesticide use.
- Local eating supports local growers and producers, which strengthens your local economy, can increase biodiversity, reduces the carbon production from shipping food, can minimize food packaging waste, and provides food security – as well as fresh food – for your region.
- Local food is fresher and in season, giving it fuller flavours, and in some cases more nutrients than foods that are picked before they are ripe and shipped great distances.
- Eating locally will often inspire healthier eating habits, including consuming more whole foods, and fewer packaged and processed ones.
- Eating fair trade foods and organic or transitional organic foods is also important. Fair trade is a market designation that helps workers in developing countries receive fair wages and prices for their products. Farms that are certified as "transition to organic" grow food to the organic standards of their certifying body, but have not been doing it long enough yet to qualify as certified organic. Across British Columbia, there are various certifying bodies with slightly different regulations for certification as organic or transition to organic. There is also now a National Standard of Canada for Organic Agriculture.
For more information- The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating chronicles a year-long quest by a Vancouver couple to eat only foods grown within a 100-mile radius of where they were. Their story is inspiring and full of ideas of ways to find more varieties of food and eat well closer to home.
- Search the Certified Organic Association of BC to find a BC organic food producer by region or product.
- If you live in or near the Fraser Valley, the Fraser Valley Direct Farm Marketing Association has an online search engine to find farm products at local farms.
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