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Posts Tagged ‘locavores’

Each year and several times through-out each year, we have been faced with the dangers of tainted produce from freshly purchase vegetables from our neighborhood grocery stores.  And many of those problems started in the fields, or during the handling of this produce … prior to it reaching the shelves of the vendors.

Without question veggies are a necessary component of our daily diets, but the fear of eating disease riddled greens is rising.

For some of us the solution to the dilemma lies in our backyard gardens and for others they have turned to known local farmers for meeting whatever the dietary need is.

Just recently I learned that their is a growing contingent of people that have decided to buy their produce from local vendor that are within a specific distance from their homes … these folks are know as locavores. Below an excerpt from’wikipedia’…

Local food systems are an alternative to the global corporate models where producers and consumers are separated through a chain of processors/manufacturers, shippers and retailers. With an increasing scale of industrial food systems the control of quality is increasingly decided by the middlemen while a local food system redevelops these relationships and encourage a return of quality control to the consumer and the producer respectively. These quality characteristics are not only in the product but in the method of producing.^[3]

The development of local food systems is not only about environmental impacts but also the social and economic benefits encouraged through building local relationships. “Buying and producing locally enables accountability. Distance disables accountability.”^[4]

Another excerpt …

Those who prefer to eat locally grown/produced food sometimes call themselves “localvores” or locavores.^[2]

So, although their is a rising problem … their are alternatives, alternatives which benefit not only our families … but the disappearing american farm and their families.