March 9th, 2007

Should I eat local, or organic?

Posted by Alex Payson at 11:19 am

Last week Time magazine ran a lengthy article on the debate between eating locally grown foods that are not organic, versus organic food that traveled a few thousand miles to your fridge.

From the article:

“If you send it halfway around the world before it is eaten,” he (ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan) mused, “an organic food still may be ‘good’ for the consumer, but is it ‘good’ for the food system?”

It continues:

…shipping a strawberry from California to New York requires 435 calories of fossil fuel but provides the eater with only 5 calories of nutrition.

If you have a few minutes I suggest reading the whole article here, it is very well thought out and researched.

The author’s conclusion?

Eating locally also seems safer. Ted’s neighbors and customers can see how he farms. That transparency doesn’t exist with, say, spinach bagged by a distant agribusiness. I help keep Ted in business, and he helps keep me fed–and the elegance and sustainability of that exchange make more sense to me than gambling on faceless producers who stamp organic on a package thousands of miles from my home. I’m not a purist about these choices–I ate a Filet-O-Fish at McDonald’s on the way to Ted’s farm. But in general, I have decided that you are where you eat.

Posted in General news, Our causes