Something I wrote last summer...

Why I am a Locavore[1]

By Gavia Lertzman Lepofsky

When you go into a grocery store, sights, smells, and sounds assault you. Walk down to the vegetables and fruit aisle. Pick up some lettuce, bananas, apples, and strawberries. You pause, you think a moment: don’t apples, lettuce, and strawberries grow at different times of year? Where does one grow bananas? Most of the fruit and veggies we buy from stores are not local, out of season, and non-organic food. The food is flown in from a faraway place. In this essay, I will try to convince you that buying local, in season, and organic food is better both for you and the environment.

We have become used to getting all sorts of produce in all seasons, without questioning where it comes from. For us to have received lettuce in January, or apples in May, they will have been shipped half way across the world from someplace that has a different growing season than ours. Not only that, but we are getting fruit that would never have grown here naturally in any season. We get bananas, star fruit, pineapples, and mangoes from half way around the world. Any guesses how all this “healthy” food gets here?—aeroplanes. In addition, for soft and delicate foods, such as tomatoes to survive the long haul flight, they are often genetically modified (GM). Ever notice that fresh produce from a farmers market tastes better?

There is evidence that our supposedly “healthy” food isn’t actually all it is said to be. When the scientists modified fresh food genetically to make it more transportable (thicker skins, tougher, and more regular sizes), no one considered that those changes would also effect the taste and nutritional value of the fruit. For example, tomatoes with a thicker skin are generally frowned upon, but, low and behold, GM tomatoes have thicker tougher skin to make them more transportable. Many of America’s lead food writers talk about how our formerly healthy food is lacking in nutrition and taste. That is why farmer’s market produce tastes better. They are selling the real, unadulterated food.

The environment benefits from organic and local food too. In non-organic farms people spray herbicides and pesticides to kill the “weeds”, insects, and plant diseases. It works all too well. The pest species of insects die, but many “good” insect predators of the pests die as well. Sometimes, the birds that eat the insects die, and the animals that eat the birds can die as well. We ingest those very same plants that have all those chemicals on them, the ones that killed the bugs. So you would think that after all of this extermination the plants would be healthier, right? Well no, because over time, the pests evolve resistance to the chemicals. What we’re actually doing is promoting pesticide-resistant pests. And since many of the farms are monocultures—and all their industrial neighbours are planted with the same GM strain of the same crop—the whole area is susceptible to a pest outbreak or disease. That is one the reasons why farms that plant a variety of produce are good. If one crop catches the “bug” the farmer still has other foods to sell.

Most of the food in a normal North American dinner has travelled a long way to reach your dinner plate. When food is flown in from Chile, whether or not it is organic, the aeroplanes guzzle a lot of fuel. Many people are trying to drive less, not only to save money on fuel, but also to reduce their contributions to Global Climate Change. If we drive less, we will add less carbon to the atmosphere. However, by purchasing food from far away, like lemons from Chile[2], anything we have been doing at home to reduce our carbon footprint can be erased. Aeroplanes have a big effect on the climate for two reasons. One, they use up a lot of fuel—and by doing so release a lot of carbon, and two, carbon that is released high in the atmosphere has twice the effect as when it is released on the ground. “Aeroplanes contribute 4-9% of the total climate change impact of human activity”[3]. When we buy such world weary food we are stressing climate’s and wildlife’s health.

People say “Choose the right thing”. Well how should we know what the right thing is? Who do we want to benefit from our choices: big, multi-national, agribusinesses, small organic farms, the environment, ourselves … ? If we consider carefully, we can make these into win-win decisions. If we choose to buy from a small-scale, local, organic farmer, everyone benefits (except the multi-nationals, who get enough money from other people). The farmer gets an income, the animals and ecosystems don’t get abused with chemicals—and we get delicious fresh food.

Sources

1) Kingsolver, Barbara, Steven Hopp, Camille Kingsolver. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2007

2) Knowledgeable family members and friends

3) Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006

4) Powlick, Thomas. The End of Food: how the food industry is destroying our food supply and what we can do about it. UC press, Greystone books, Vancouver, 2006

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[1] A Locavore is someone who prefers to eat locally grown, preferably organic, food.

[2] We recently found lemons in the grocery store that came from Chile. In the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan discussed getting organic asparagus from Chile—it tasted like cardboard.

[3] From the David Suzuki Foundation Website