Why You Should Eat Local

Eating food grown in your community has deep nutritional and social benefits

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One of the best ways you can improve the nutrient value and social benefit of your food is to eat local.

Throughout most of human history, humankind ate food that was close at hand, according to the natural change of seasons, out of necessity. But this practice has numerous benefits, including tying us more closely to the land and seasons. In traditional Chinese medicine, eating in season is important to ensure that one’s mind and body stay well adapted to the time of year.

Following the Industrial Revolution and the rise of large agriculture corporations, our food system shifted tremendously, and new methods of farming, genetic engineering, and globalization have transformed what we eat.

Local food is often defined as food purchased or consumed within a 100-mile radius of where it was produced. In contrast, many imported fruits and vegetables make a long trek from distant lands like India, China, the Philippines, and Brazil. Even within the United States, most produce comes from just one state—California.

While the current system offers some obvious benefits, eating local offers deep nutritional, social, and economic benefits.

Food Is Connection

Food brings us together with friends and loved ones, and local food is a great way to connect with your community. Shopping for fresh, local food lets us cultivate relationships with farmers, many of whom are happy to share their practices with you, including how animals are raised or produce is grown. Connecting with your local food community also helps to push back against our increasingly digital and isolated culture.

Not only does food connect us with local communities, but it also connects us with time-honored traditions and wisdom passed down by our ancestors. Food is a vessel that passes heritage from one generation to the next—from best practices of growing and preserving food to those of cooking and sharing it.

Local = Ripe

Many other benefits are inherent in slow, seasonal eating. Local food tastes better, as it can ripen to its peak before harvest. Fully ripened produce yields delicious, vibrant flavors. Food that travels does not ripen optimally because it is picked long before it is eaten, which results in inferior taste and nutrition.

Properly ripened food has higher nutritional value, while produce transported long distances can lose nutrients by the mile. For example, most produce, such as broccoli, green beans, kale, red peppers, tomatoes, apricots, and peaches, are susceptible to losing nutrients soon after harvest. One study compared the vitamin C content of broccoli grown locally in season (the fall) to broccoli grown in the spring and transported long distances to the same supermarkets, and found that the amount of vitamin C in the out-of-season broccoli was about half that of the seasonal broccoli.

If your food is not local, it may have been artificially ripened. Many produce items such as apples, pears, and bananas are artificially ripened with agents such as calcium carbide, ethephon, and ethylene. These gases make fruits available to customers when these foods are not in season; fruits are picked prior to ripening, as ripe fruit is prone to spoilage and bruising, and the gases are used to ripen them on the off-season. Despite strong concerns around the globe over the safety of these compounds, these chemicals have not been thoroughly tested for human safety.

For example, many fruit producers use calcium carbide, which is hazardous to the human body as it contains harmful traces of arsenic and phosphorus. Once dissolved in water, the carbide produces acetylene gas, which has the potential to decrease oxygen to the brain and induce prolonged hypoxia, associated with headaches, vertigo, dizziness, mood disturbances, sleepiness, mental confusion, memory loss, cerebral edema, and seizures. This can also cause abdominal pain, vomiting, and diarrhea.

Furthermore, ethephon has been shown to be toxic to the liver. Given this evidence, we are potentially at risk of negative health effects simply by eating fruits that are artificially induced to ripen.

Thus, local, seasonal produce is not only more nutrient-dense, but also safer than imported produce.

The Soil Connection

You can often see at a glance if the food you get from your local farmer is grown in healthy soil: Is it rich, dark, and loamy, or is it a growing medium dependent on chemical fertilizers? To achieve robust nutrition in food, rich, organic soil is needed. Soil requires a combination of minerals, organisms, air, and water. Some say that rich soil takes anywhere from 100–1,000 years to develop. Life-giving crops require life-giving soil.

Sadly, conventional farming practices that utilize pesticides, herbicides, and artificial fertilizers literally strip the life out of the soil, which is compounded as the years go by. After decades of agricultural mismanagement and chemical dependency, our soils have been grossly depleted of essential nutrients such as protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and ascorbic acid. Industrial farming practices also kill off bacteria and fungi that create organic materials vital to thriving crops.

These practices can degrade our bodies, as well: When nutrient-poor foods are consumed, we run the risk of nutrient depletion.

More Benefits

Seasonal eating increases diversity in the diet. Rather than relying on the same foods throughout the year, eating seasonally according to local availability expands variety. This dietary diversity is important for a thriving microbiome because the microorganisms within the gut do best with a vast assortment of fibers and food compounds.

Local, seasonal eating is environmentally friendly. Eating food grown close to home allows consumers to directly support their local farmers, removes the need for long-distance transport, and helps reduce the carbon footprint of their food. Within the United States, food may travel 1,500 miles or farther, whereas local foods only travel 100 miles or less. Obviously, this also feeds the local economy and keeps resources nearby.

Smaller farms usually use fewer pesticides and herbicides than industrial farmers. Organic certification comes with a high price tag, and many small-scale farmers—even if they use few or no pesticides or herbicides—are unable to afford this certification or prefer not to raise their prices to cover the cost.

Whether you have a garden of your own or frequent a farmers market, there is a beautiful simplicity in eating with the seasons. This way of eating is clearly most profitable to our bodies, the local economy, and the environment. We cannot underestimate the deep value of developing relationships with local food producers and having a deep understanding of where our nourishment comes from. My heart stirs when I ponder what it would look like for our world to collectively get back to these roots.

Curious how to connect with your local food community? Local Harvest (localharvest.com) is a wonderful search engine designed to help source local foods in your area. Additionally, visiting your local farmers market is a great way to meet food producers and cultivate relationships with them. If we are wise, we will look nearby for nourishment.

Localization

The larger benefits of eating local unwind some of the consequences of today’s unhealthy economic patterns. Pursuing localization—focusing our business or economic activities in local areas rather than nationally or internationally—is a specific strategy for reversing some of the negative effects of globalization. Localization is key to creating thriving, sustainable communities. We should be focusing on local when it comes to food, health care, education, small businesses, trades, and spiritual and community institutions.

Reaching beyond our local area places resources and responsibility in the hands of distant powers, disconnects us from natural reality, and leaves us vulnerable. Find your local food producers, link arms in solidarity with them, and support them at all costs.

Our current food system does have benefits; it gives us slightly cheaper produce and a wider variety of fruits and vegetables in every season.

“But, in striking that devil’s bargain,” notes writer Rod Dreher, “we sign away our responsibility for what’s in that food, how it got there, and what was done to human communities to close the deal. To participate in a system and a way of thinking in which the act of eating is merely a commercial transaction is to sell out our spiritual and cultural patrimony.”

If ever there was a time in history to passionately pursue local, it is now.

Dr. Ashley Turner is a traditionally trained naturopath and board-certified doctor of holistic health for the Restorative Wellness Center. An expert in functional medicine, Dr. Turner is the author of the gut-healing guide “Restorative Kitchen” and of “Restorative Traditions,” a cookbook of noninflammatory holiday recipes.