Why buy local food?This is a featured page

There are a lot of reasons to buy local food. Here are a highly subjective list:

  • It's fresh.
    The average item of food bought in the US has travelled about 1,500 miles. That's a long way to travel and it takes time. In order to ensure that produce doesn't spoil before it reaches the store, it is picked before it's ripe. But that still doesn't mean that it's 'fresh' when you get it. Local food, on the other hand, has a much better chance of being picked the day you buy it.
  • You support your community.
    When you buy most food at the store, money is leaving your community. When you buy local food, money stays within your community. You are giving it to your neighbors.
  • You know where it's been
    When food travels 1,500 miles to get to you, you have no idea how it was grown or raised, and you have no way to give feedback to the people who made it. When you buy local food, though, you are often buying it from the people who made it. You can ask them questions about how it was produced. You can often actually visit the location and see the conditions. And you can express your concerns directly to the people responsible for it.
  • Save fuel.
    (1,500 miles) times (whatever poor gas mileage trucks get) times ($3.50 per gallon) = a lot of extra gasoline used to haul this stuff around. Buying it locally saves that gas, and that money.
  • More money goes to the farmer
    When you buy food at the store, some of the money goes to the store, some of the money goes to the people who transported the food, some of the money goes to the company that owns the farm, and whatever is leftover goes to the people who actually grew the food. Buying it locally cuts out a lot of the middlemen and ensures that the people who made it can make a decent living at it.
  • Better quality.
    A company raising 5,000,000 cattle is more concerned about uniformity and consistency then they are about high quality. A local farmer raising beef knows that his livelihood depends on that beef's quality. Not every item of locally produced food is going to be better than non-local. But the incentive is much more direct - if he doesn't produce good quality, people will go somewhere else.

What is Local Food?
Where can I find Local Food?
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