Does eating right mean you’re eating…right? Since long before Joni Mitchell was singing about D.D.T. and spots on apples, people have been concerned about how their food is grown and cultivated. But no longer confined to the Canadian folk singer crowd or to that aisle in the supermarket with British cereals and Australian vegemite, organic food has gone mainstream. Organic food is the fastest growing food sector in the United States, averaging a 20% annual growth rate each year since 1990. Wal-Mart now offers a line of organic food. But maybe we should be more concerned with where the food originates than how.
A few weeks ago, after biting into a delicious organic apple purchased at our neighborhood grocery store, I noticed that the label said ‘Grown in South Africa.’ Let’s assume it had been grown without the use of pesticides and employing the very latest in sustainable agricultural techniques, the apple still had to travel from an orchard in South Africa to my kitchen table in New England. In an earlier post, we considered the concept of an ecological backpack. This tiny apple had a big ol’ backpack!
The concept of buying and eating locally is part of a broader sustainability approach, where food production, processing, distribution, and consumption is integrated to enhance the economic development and well-being of a particular community. Eating locally almost always equates to eating healthy. Consider the benefits of what some refer to as the ‘100 mile diet‘ (choosing to eat food produced within a 100 mile radius); food is fresher (therefore richer in nutrients and taste), and its relative environmental impact is much lower.
