Why buy local and organic?

When you go out shopping for food, pick vegetables that are not transported by plane; the same goes for fruit. The most important advice is to eat the food you bring home; don’t throw it away, because that’s a waste of resources. Choosing real food—fresh, whole food—is a way to choose nourishment that’s not only good for your body but good for the planet, too.

World trade in food is a major source of greenhouse gases, contributing to global warming. Fossil fuels are used to ship foods long distances. Food trade is growing rapidly. Governments promote trade. Who benefits? Big corporations and big oil.

Walk into any supermarket and you’ll see shelves lined with products bursting with trans fats, high-fructose corn syrup, and additives whose multi-syllabic names can make you go cross-eyed. Each of these ingredients takes tremendous amounts of energy to create and even more energy to import! Kids who are fed a diet of non-chemical foods have fewer traces of chemical residues in their bodies.

Organic foods may also have higher levels of essential nutrients and antioxidants. New research is documenting that organic farms can emit as much as half the carbon dioxide as chemical farms. Organic farms also use much less fossil fuel energy than their conventional counterparts, in many cases as much as one-third less. And organic agriculture can provide a critical carbon sink, sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. In fact, 10,000 medium-sized organic farms can store as much carbon in the soil as we would save if we took one million cars off the road. Just one more reason to go organic!

Remember your grandmother’s mealtime lecture to finish the food on your plate because there were starving kids in Africa? That admonition takes on a whole new meaning in our global warming era. So, let’s try to eat only what we need, waste less, and compost our food scraps. --- Source: The Climate Project