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Food and Agriculture
We all eat food. This region has a healthy agricultural community that is producing a wide variety of fresh, healthy food, while reducing the negative environmental, economic and social consequences associated with our present global food system.
This section of the Green Shopping Guide will help you to find many exciting products, that are produced in a manner that helps to sustain the environment rather than degrade it.
Here are some key concepts that will help you make more environmentally sound choices when you are purchasing food and farm products.
Buy Local Food and Farm Products
Buy Ecologically Grown Food and Farm Products
Buy Fair Trade Products
Buy Local Food and Farm Products
Getting to know what is locally available and always asking where products are produced helps make buying local food and farm products one of the easiest ways to make a significant positive contribution to both our local economy and the environment.
The term "Food Miles" refers to the distance food travels from the field where it is grown to your table. "It is estimated that the elements of a basic North American meal travel 2,400 km". (David Suzuki Foundation) By purchasing local food you reduce the impacts that our massive transportation system has on the environment: for example you help reduce the amount of heat-trapping gases which cause global climate change.
Another benefit of purchasing local food is that it is usually minimally packaged - especially if you buy it directly from a grower or at the local farmers' market. You can even bring your own cloth bags or baskets to put it in!
Buying local food also keeps your dollars circulating in the community. This helps to ensure that family farms in our community will continue to thrive and that healthy, flavourful, plentiful food will be available for future generations.
Buy Ecologically Grown Food and Farm Products
Knowing where your food comes from and how it is grown or raised enables you to choose safe food from farmers who avoid or reduce their use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, or genetically modified seed in their operations. This is good for your family as well as the environment.
One of the easist ways to do this is to look for those farm products that are "Certified Organic" which ensures that the product has been produced in a sustainable farming system.
However, there are also many local sustainable farming systems that have not gone through the "organic" certification process or are in transition to organic. So it is best to get to know your farmer, ask questions about their farming system and choose those people you know and trust. Some farmers are also happy to have you out to their farms to see how they do things, so you can decide for yourself!
Buy Fair Trade Products
For those food products that you deem neccessary that are not locally produced, consider finding an organic and fair trade source. "Fair Trade" is an independent labelling system, which ensures that the producers are paid a fair price for the product you purchase. Most fair trade farmers are small-scale farmers that are using more traditional and often more envrionmentally friendly farming techniques and belong to democratically run cooperatives to market their products.
Resource & Information Links
Food KMs
www.foodkm.com
Searchable by postal code, this site is tailor made to help you find food that is produced locally to you. Give it a visit, and to help it grow maybe you can refer your local farmer to it for posting!
Hundred Mile Diet
www.100milediet.org
US site designed around the popular book of the same title.
The Life Cycles Project
www.lifecyclesproject.ca/initiatives/food_miles/
BC Canada project discusses the benefits of eating local foods.
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