Thinking About Where Your Food Comes From
I think about where my food comes from, and I try to get it from as local a source as possible: my backyard, my CSA, an orchard that I visit, a farmer whom I’ve met, the local co-op. But even so, it’s not possible to get everything from these places and I wind up buying some of my food from the Giant Eagle (the local Pittsburgh supermarket).
Even so, this video from Local Harvest opened my eyes to some concerns I hadn’t even realized. For instance, a box of breakfast cereal contains, on average, 1100 kilocalories of nutritional value but takes 7000 kilocalories of energy to produce.
Take a three-minute break and watch the video. Learn how much energy (and oil) is being devoted to trucking food from one end of the country to another and turn it into cellophane-wrapped convenience. Learn how opting for locally-produced and minimally-processed foodstuffs can make a big difference to some of the biggest issues facing us today: greenhouse gas emissions, oil dependence, and environmental sustainability.
Thanks to Troy Bogdan of Pure Earth Organic Farm for sending this video my way.