Why Being a Localvore Makes Good Sense

Bob Ewing--I like my food fresh. Fresh food is the most healthy and best tasting food available. Food that travels a long distance from the field where it is grown to your table is not fresh. It has aged in transit and loss goodness and taste. If you want fresh food you either grow it yourself or purchase from someone who has grown it close, say within 100 miles, of your home.
Over the past few years the localvore movement has sprung up in response to peoples growing demand for truly fresh food. A localvore is someone who seeks out food that is produced or grown locally.

[caption id="attachment_15406" align="alignnone" width="300"] Community Garden[/caption]

A localvore is a person dedicated to eating food grown and produced locally. There are a lot of good reasons to eat locally grown and produced food. Besides being flesh why do people want to purchase and consume locally grown food? Here are two good reasons:

1- The production of locally grown food requires fewer resources (primarily fossil fuels). In addition to the resources spent in growing the food additional resources are required for packing and shipping. Packing food for a long distant journey demands a different type of packaging than needed for a short hop to a farmers market, for example.

2-Buying locally produced food builds the local economy, because money spent at locally own shops tends to stay within he community longer (it circulates locally more often) than money spent in chain stores whose owners are far removed from the community.

Society can begin the transition from a consumer capitalist model were the majority of people are consumers to cooperative capitalist model were the majority of people are consumers and producers, by starting with the development of local food enterprises and supportive municipal bylaws.

The most effective way to bring that change about is to do two things:

1- Buy from locally owned businesses whenever possible, start by becoming a localvore to the best of your ability.
2- Begin to grow some of your own food. There are many ways people can grow at least of a portion of what they eat. Community gardens are one, yard sharing is another.

Hyperlocalvore describes yard sharing as:

“Yard sharing is an arrangement between people to share skills and gardening resources; space, time, strength, tools or skills, in order to grow food as locally as possible, to make neighborhoods resilient, kids healthy and food much cheaper! The group can be friends, family, neighbors, members of a faith community (or any combination!) It's also been called garden sharing or land sharing,”

The economy across North America is spinning downward, if you have not already done so; begin the transition from a dependent to an interdependent community by growing some of your own food and buying the rest from a local grower or producer.

Food Prices Too High: Shop With Friends

Bob Ewing - What do you think; are food prices still rising or has the increase, in just about anything edible, begun to slow down?

The flow of information across the Internet is overwhelming, and there is no way to stay on top of all that is going on, no matter which news source you use. However, I find Google alerts helps me narrow down my quest for information on the subjects, such as urban agriculture, green building and community energy, that interest me. Google alerts are easy to use and save surfing time.

One topic I have been following is food prices, and within North America, I am seeing a number of news and blog posts that inform me that food prices are still rising but the rise is slowing down.

My experience in the grocery store is different. I shop regularly, but do not buy that much, however, I always check prices to see how much they are going up; they rarely go down, unless there is a sale.

Now, I know there is a time lag between prices being lowered by the supplier, and the prices being lowered for the end user, but I am beginning to suspect that a slow down in the cost for individual items, purchased at a chain grocery store, is not likely to go down. It may level off for awhile but go down; I am not planning on holding my breath waiting for that to happen. In fact, I suspect food prices to continue to rise, slowly but steadily.

So how do people,, who have not seen a raise or have lost income continue, to buy food?

I see two solutions; one is to grow our own food, either on an individual basis or on a community basis. The second is to form a food buying club. Simply put, a few people come together and make bulk purchases and then split up the goods, so each gets a share equal to their investment. It works best if everyone puts in the same amount of money; however, people can split large quantities of items such as potatoes, canned goods and carrots anyway they choose.

Items such as rice and pasta can be weighed and people bring their own containers and pay for what they need. These details will need to be worked out first.

One person buying six cans of tomato sauce is going to pay the asking price, but a group of people buying 60 cans of the same product may have some leverage. This plan works best with small privately owned stores.

If the group finds this way to buy grocery works for them, they may want to take it to the next step and form a food buying cooperative.

[caption id="attachment_15152" align="alignnone" width="260"] all local ingredients[/caption]

The Way Out 2: Turn Waste into a Resource

[caption id="attachment_14054" align="alignleft" width="230" caption="Refuse"][/caption]

Bob Ewing - One of the first steps towards building sustainable, local economies is to change how we view garbage. Instead of seeing waste or something that needs to be thrown away, we need to accept that there is no such place as away and what we call garbage could well be a resource. Food is a prime example.

Last week we talked about diverting edible food from the garbage to the table. This week we will take a close look at compost.

What food items can we compost? Place the following in your compost bin:

• All vegetable and fruit wastes, (including rinds and cores) even if they are moldy and ugly
• Old bread, donuts, cookies, crackers, pizza crust, noodles: anything made out of flour!
• Grains (cooked or uncooked): rice, barley, you name it
• Coffee grounds, tea bags, filters
• Fruit or vegetable pulp from juicing
• Old spices
• Outdated boxed foods from the pantry
• Egg shells (crush well)
• Corn cobs and husks (cobs breakdown very slowly)

When you compost food waste, you not only divert items from the waste stream, but you actualize the true potential of those items; in the case of composting, you turn food scrapes into food for your garden. Composting produces a rich, organic feed for your soil and well fed soil will grow strong and healthy plants.

For home gardeners, whether they grow in containers or raised beds, compost will help the garden grow. Those heritage seeds you bough will flourish in the well fed bed. Lets take a look at composting on a large scale.

Rutgers University serves over 3.3 million meals and caters more than 5,000 events each year. The University is well known for its food recovery system which was started in the 1960s.

Rutgers had a food waste problem, one they solved by diverting food scraps to a local farm for use as animal feed.

The leftover food is put into a trough which delivers it as well as used napkins to a pulper. Excess water is removed and the food scrapes are pulverized. The result is deposited into barrels and is stored in a refrigerator until a local farmer hauls them to his farm.

Water from the system is recycled to transport more scraps to the pulper.

The farm is less than 15 miles away. The farm uses the pulverized food scraps, averaging 1.125 tons per day, to feed hogs and cattle.

The farmer charges $30 per ton, as opposed to the approximately $60 that Rutgers pays to haul a ton of trash to the landfill.

The school saves money and the farmer gets a valuable commodity for his operation.

On a local or community scale, thin about a cooperative that offers gardening services to the public and sells its own brand of compost. The compost comes from the food scrapes generated by the cooperative members and perhaps from a local restaurant or two.

A little imagination applied to this scenario could create a business opportunity all because we looked at waste as a resource rather than something to be cast aside.