Eating a raw food diet that is GMO-free is the key to nutritive, digestive, and overall health for your body. As you know, the more you cut out mainstream food supply the better. This way, you can better avoid the poisonous additives found in over 70% of our foods, refined sugars, processed foods, and the like. Moreover, by choosing a raw foodist lifestyle, you are securing the utmost in your vegetables and fruits nutrient and mineral potential. Is there anything else you can do to make sure you are getting the most out of your foods? Yes, there is. The answer to this is eating locally and seasonally.
So, why is it so important to make sure your fruits and vegetables are bought locally and in season? For a number of vital reasons really. Below, we take a look at the most significant reasons to only purchase your produce locally and during the correct season.
Freshness: One of the most important reasons to choose your fruits and veggies from a local farm stand or shop is that since it did not have to travel to get to you-you instead travelled to it-it is all the more fresh. Chances are, the fruits and veggies that you purchase locally have just been picked. This means more flavor, and more nutritional value.
Local Support: Another important benefit of purchasing local and in season, is that in doing so, you are supporting the local economy, and staving off less support for big business. This, in turn, improves your local community through financial support.
Environment: By purchasing your produce at a local farm or store, you are also protecting the environment from excess pollution and shipping energies. Think of the amount of energy used, vehicle pollution exercised, and overall waste of shipping materials and transport that would be involved with purchasing out of town. By buying locally, you can easily cut down on the environmental burden.
Variety: A great thing about choosing to eat locally and in season, is that you are able to purchase the fruits and vegetables that wouldn't necessarily be able to travel. Typically, farmers will set aside a bunch of more strong produce that can endure the rigors of shipping, while keeping a wider variety of produce that is more ripe and less travel-weary than others. You gain the value of this great variety of taste.
Nature: By choosing to purchase locally-and by way of this, in season- you are subscribing to how nature intended it. Ever wonder why some vegetables and fruits are native to certain seasons? It is because the original plan was to have the land provide the types of foods-with necessary nutrients and nutritional value, etc-that humans would need during that season. For example, during the Fall-as we begin to ready ourselves for colder months-you may notice heavier stock veggies being at the height of the season. This is because nature knows we need to prepare for winter with more substantial foods.
Land Development: Another indirect benefit of buying your fruits and vegetables local is that you are supporting farmers right to afford their own lands. Every farmer-by necessity-needs a certain amount of land to be able to grow their produce and raise their livestock. Unfortunately, when more and more people start buying their produce at grocery stores, there's less money going to the farmer, and less chance of him/her being able to maintain the upkeep and costs. When you buy local, you ensure that farmers around you can keep their land, instead of having to sell it to developers that would commercialize it with a strip mall or some other treeless endeavor.
Expense: Though you might think that buying your fruits and vegetables from a local farm or store would be more expensive than at grocery store, you could be wrong-as far as when you buy it. Depending on when you buy your produce-in season or not-you could save quite a bit more money. It is based upon one of the most simplest of concepts: supply and demand. The more product a farm has, the less it will cost you. The farm will always have a lot if you buy in season, and this will drive down the cost to match or beat the grocery store chain's prices.
Contamination: The less far your fruits and vegetables have to travel, the less likely that they will be treated with preservatives, unhealthy conditions, and/or contamination. Just think of how far some of the favorites you have from the grocery store-as far as produce is concerned-have had to travel to get to your store. Do you even know where they came from? Exactly. Imagine all the bad conditions and possible contamination they could have been subjected to along the way? With a local farmstand or store, you know that the most it traveled was from the farmland behind the store, and is thereby, as uncontaminated as possible.
Choosing to buy only local produce that is in-season is just another step in the long road we have begun to tread upon towards a better, more informed, healthy future. Unfortunately, with so many problems in our economy and environment, we have no real idea what is happening to our food supply-except that we know that it is regularly contaminated with pesticides, subject to genetic modification, and processed with harmful additives and poisons. I cannot stress enough that more than 70% of our foods are full of addictive, unhealthy additives, and we have more genetically modified organisms living in our everyday foods than not. The best that we can do is-of course-to choose a diet and lifestyle that is full of untampered with foods, such as raw vegetables and fruits, and monitor where and how these foods are making it to our tables. The best way that we can do this, is to purchase all of our vegetables and fruits during the season in which it was intended and at a local farm or store that sells locally-grown foods.
By TTS Cofounder Botanical Chef Omid Jaffari
|
Prev
