Photo: Kelly Hunt

Eating Local and it’s effect on our environment.
By choosing to eat local, you are saving the world’s lungs of up to 17 times the oil and gas that would usually be consumed just by getting the food to your plate. In the average North American home, when we sit down (or stand!) to eat, each ingredient has typically travelled at least 1,500 miles. That is a heck of a lot of carbon!

Wake up your taste buds – Taste Matters!
When you shop at the Farmers Market, or your local grocer and choose to buy Ontario grown produce over imported produce that may have been shipped in from Mexico or California, you are eating food that has been picked at it’s prime, inside of 24 hours.

You will find that this food is superior in taste, it has not been bred to withstand long, rough truck or ship rides and it has not been picked weeks (sometimes months!) early. This makes locally grown and harvested vegetables and foods better tasting, and all around nutritionally better for you.

Get a Food Education
Be aware of what you are eating. It is much easier to find out if the farmer sprays his/her foods with anything or if your corn is a genetically modified product (GMO) if you decide to eat local. Less travel means that it is easier to get to the source of your food.

Find out how it is actually grown. There are many reasons that sometimes locally produced food may be a tad more expensive, but these reasons are generally well justified and worth the extra cost involved. You will also have a new-found respect for why an ontario strawberry tastes so much better in June, than a shipped strawberry from a far-away land in the middle of February.

Get Social
Bring back community. Talk to the people who grow your food. When you shop directly from the farmer, there is a wonderful benefit of a food and social education. You will find out about how your food grows, why it looks the way it does, who grew it, the history behind a certain variety of vegetable that may have deep roots within our community of London. Shopping local will connect you with the people around you in ways that benefit our community financially as well as socially. Being a locavore also makes you a local-tourist. Searching out your local suppliers and visiting them makes for some very reasonable mini-getaways with added food benefits!

Drink Great Wine and Spirits!
We are lucky enough to be within 100 miles of many great breweries, and wineries right here in Southwestern Ontario. This is a major bonus in the eating local challenge. Make sure to check out your 100 miles, you will see that it is a lot farther and includes much more than you may think.