The Power of Eating Locally - Kat Tancock, Guest Blogger

As you might have noticed, we've started featuring green-themed content this month on The Savvy Reader. In honour of the upcoming April 22 Earth Day, Kat Tancock, a web editor at Canadian Living Magazine and the author of CanadianLiving.com's Green Living Blog, will highlight some of the issues for us Savvy Readers. And then I'll tie it all back into a book you should absolutely be reading this month. Here's our first attempt:

The Power of Eating Locally by Kat Tancock

Once upon a time, imported fruits and vegetables were an extravagance, something to be savoured as an exception to the rule for special occasions -– like oranges in Christmas stockings. Now, imports are the norm, and since so many grocery store chains do their purchasing in bulk, you'd be hard-pressed to find local produce even when it's in season.

There are many social and ecological advantages to purchasing locally grown and produced food:

• Less food kilometres
By buying lettuce from a local farmer rather than an industrial farm in California, you're drastically reducing the amount of fossil fuels used to ship that produce.

• Safer food
While much of the food imported into our country is monitored, a lot slips through. Many developing nations have standards of pesticide use that are markedly different than ours, and they often use chemicals deemed unsafe in Canada.

• Support the local economy
By purchasing food from local farmers and producers, you're ensuring that your dollars stay local, too.

• Maintain our farming communities
There's been a strong decrease in the number of people in Canada who make a living from farming, and the average age of farmers is increasing at the same time -– it's over 52 now. By buying from local farmers, you're helping maintain farming as a viable career choice.

So how can you start eating more local food? Here are a few suggestions.

• Shop at your farmer's market
You can meet the farmers, ask questions about the produce and get the freshest, most in-season goods available.

• Order a weekly food box
These are available across the country in most urban areas, and allow you to get fresh, locally grown produce delivered straight to your door. (Services vary; some focus on organic, others on local, and especially in winter, you might see imports as well.)

• Grow your own
Forget the 100-mile diet; what about the 10-metre diet? Even if all you can handle is a pot of basil and chives on your front porch, it will help you cut back on food kilometres and give you a taste of freshly picked food.

• Visit a farm
Take the kids berry-picking this summer or stop in at a farm stand on the way home from the cottage. Even get ambitious -- can or freeze seasonal produce for the rest of the year. 

• Think past fruits and vegetables
Buy bread from a local baker instead of factory-made loaves. Choose Canadian cheese instead of European. Pick up a local microbrew at the beer store instead of Heineken or Guinness.

• Eat with the seasons
Buy strawberries when they're local, and skip them the rest of the year. They taste that much better that it's worth the wait. Same goes for cherries, peaches, apples and blueberries -– savour them fresh and in season and spend the rest of the year looking forward to them. (To watch for soon: asparagus, fiddleheads, rhubarb and salad greens.)

Even if you can't eat local all the time, I think you'll find your experiences with food much more enriched when you change your diet with the seasons and develop a relationship with local farmers.

To explore the theme of local eating further, read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. The author and her family up and moved from Arizona to run a farm in the southern Appalachians where they vowed to spend an entire year eating only food they either produced (and raised!) themselves or could buy locally from other farmers. It's a book that will change your life, and I'm not even exaggerating.