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Eat local!

Local food is often fresher and tastier. Support your community and choose local growers over big agriculture.

• Eat Well Guide - find fresh, local, sustainably produced food near you. Lists farms, restaurants, and markets or stores.
• Local Harvest - comprehensive directory of farmers' markets, farm stands, U-Pick Farms and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs

Sell, trade or give away produce

The Farmer's Garden is a new resource that connects people in the community with surplus home-grown produce. Gardeners can post notices of their extra crops, and individuals and food pantries can post wanted classifieds.

Ample Harvest is another site that connects gardeners with food pantries.

Why it’s important

Buying local food not only helps local farmers thrive, it reduces energy consumption. Estimates on how long the average food travels from pasture to plate range from 1200 to 2500 miles. A lot of energy is expended freezing, refrigerating, and trucking that food around. Eating locally grown food means less fossil fuel burned in preparation and transport.

Local food is often safer, too. Even when it’s not organic, small farms tend to be less aggressive than large factory farms about dousing their wares with chemicals. And while fruits and vegetables from overseas may seem more exotic, they may also have been produced in countries with weaker environmental standards. Finally, small family farms are more likely to grow more interesting varieties (think lettuce that isn’t iceberg and apples that aren’t red delicious), making food more flavorful, protecting biodiversity and preserving a wider agricultural gene pool, an important factor in long-term food security.

Learn more

• Tips for shopping at farmers' markets - from Mother Nature Network
• 10 Ways to Eat Well - advice from Sierra magazine's "Mr. Green"
• Tufts Food Awareness Project - Concise summary of the importance of local and organic foods
• FoodRoutes - Comprehensive info source on farmers markets and local food
• On the "slow food" movement
• Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket - from the Worldwatch Institute
• Eating to Save the Earth - by Linda Riebel and Ken Jacobsen

Learn more about the Conscious Consumer Marketplace.

If you would like for your company to be listed in the Conscious Consumer Marketplace, please email Carolyn Danckaert or call 301.891.3683 ext. 125.