Why Local?

7 Reasons to Buy Florida Food

Natural, Organic, Local, Sustainable!

This is not been easy in the past. But now, with the new Community Co-op, it is easier and more convenient than it has been for a long time to buy fresh Florida foods directly from farmers. There's a growing movement that recognizes that the best tasting, freshest, highest quality foods are locally produced and sustainably grown. Here are seven reasons why this is good for this community and why you should get on this bandwagon.

1. It keeps money in the local community.
A large proportion of the money spent on food each year in Florida leaves the state almost immediately. When you buy from local producers and processors, that money stays in the local community and benefits everyone.

2. You get better tasting, higher quality, and fresher food.
For example, it's not an accident that supermarket tomatoes taste like watery moosh. Agribusiness tomatoes are grown from varieties selected, not for taste and nutrition, but rather for their abilities to be picked green and shipped long distances. Your local grower chooses varieties that taste good. What a concept.

3. You know where the food is coming from and how it was produced.
When you buy food from the supermarket, you have no idea who grew it, the conditions or land it grew on, or where the money you spend is really going. Purchasing from local farmers lets you personally connect with the individuals and lives who bring your food to the table.

4. If we don't support family farmers,
there won't be another generation of family farmers.
The best support we as "urban eaters" can give them is to buy food directly from family farmers. Consolidation in the food production and distribution system is rampant. A supermarket looks competitive, with many different brands, but in fact most of them come from only 5 giant corporations, and those 5 corporations are in the process of coalescing as two. A similar consolidation is going on in the retail grocery market, as chains like Wal Mart drive out independent grocers. As long as we pay for this process, it will continue. It is critical that people increase their direct purchases of food products from local farmers and processors so that we can preserve economic diversity and family livelihoods in rural America. We will not like it if the production, processing, and retail distribution of food becomes a locked in monopoly of giant transnational corporations.

5. Family farmers need our help.
The last twenty years have been hard on family farmers. Government policies that are supposed to help family farmers turn out to have the perverse consequence of encouraging consolidation and larger operations. Billions of government dollars are funding the displacement of the family farmer. Hidden behind these statistics are the brutal costs economists ignore because they are "off the balance sheet". Ghost towns are dotting the former rural farm landscapes. The fact is, you get what you pay for. And this is what our agribusiness dollars have wrought on the rural landscape.

6. Eating is a moral act.
Much of our food is imported from foreign countries. In many of those countries, poor farmers have been thrown off their land, with little or no compensation, so that big US companies could come in and open factory farms to supply the North American market. Water is diverted from peasant agriculture to these farms, and the people who have farmed the lands for centuries become urban squatters in the big slums on the outskirts of third world cities. And so it comes to pass that the fresh salad greens you buy in the snows of the North American winter may indeed have been snatched from the hands and mouths of hungry children in poor countries. Agribusiness foods grown in this country are harvested and processed by exploited migrant labor. The workers receive below minimum wage, no benefits, and are exposed to high levels of pesticides and other dangerous chemicals. The exploitation of these people is a scandal, and it is funded by the agribusiness industry and your supermarket grocery dollar..

7. Actions have consequences.
Food choices we make have practical consequences. By targeting as much of our grocery dollar as possible towards locally grown, sustainably produced food, we are "voting" for more prosperity, security, and a higher quality of life. Our grandparents knew the importance of supporting the local business community, and that includes the farmers. Food is such a critical aspect of life that we would be foolish to turn the food producing and distribution system entirely over to agribusiness. The right to choose means little if all the choices are dictated by faceless corporations with offices on five continents. The wave of the future is direct local relationships between rural producers and urban consumers.
with thanks to Bob Waldrop of Oklahoma Food Cooperative