Eat Local At Thanksgiving And Christmas
When you eat locally produced food, you do much more than just support local agriculture
I love Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. Days to relax, celebrate family and remind myself to be grateful for what I’ve received. The weather is usually pretty mild here in Pennsylvania at Thanksgiving, which means I can usually get outside and tinker. And of course there’s the feast, a time I’m particularly grateful to be married to a highly trained chef.
But the deeper I go into researching where and how our nation’s food is grown, how it’s harvested and how it ultimately arrives at local markets, the more I realize how vitally important it is to support local agriculture and eat local.
The carbon footprint of growing and transporting food can be simply astounding, organic included. If you’re supporting organic agriculture, that’s a good thing. But you also have to think “eat local“. If you live in Boston and you buy organic string beans shipped from California, you’ve helped to support a supply chain that stretches for roughly three thousand miles and contributes significantly to the climate crisis.
Make A Plan
When planning your Thanksgiving or holiday meals this year, please make an effort to support the local growers and farmers markets in your area. On my table we’ll have a traditional turkey raised on a local farm. I’ll buy it fresh and I’ll pay more for it than if I’d gone to my local supermarket and bought it frozen, but the quality of the bird is vastly superior. We’ll also be eating potatoes grown in my organic garden (zero carbon output on those), which I’ve stored in a potato bin in my no-room-for-the-car garage since harvesting in September. Everything else I grew this year we’ve already consumed, so we’ll be shopping for the rest of our meal at local farmers markets.
When we support our local farms, we not only get a better quality of food, we also keep money circulating in our local communities, which is of great importance during these recessionary times. Americans spend roughly 28 billion dollars on food during the Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day period. How and where you spend your dollars definitely matters and will help to drive change in our food system towards healthier choices.
Leftovers
Plan your Christmas and Thanksgiving meals according to how many will be attending, so that you have a minimum of leftovers. On Black Friday every year, I make turkey soup from the carcass so nothing from the bird goes to waste, including the gizzards. And after dinner, remember to save everyone’s table scraps (sans turkey and bones) for your compost pile!
To find a grower who sells organic turkeys in your area, visit Local Harvest
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