Article: Home Cookin'

Here's an excerpt from an article titled Home Cookin' by Kate Sheppard. It was on the MSN homepage today and illustrates the benefits of local eating:

According to the sustainability think tank Worldwatch Institute, the food on the average American plate was trucked in from more than 1,500 miles away. It spent anywhere from seven to 14 days in transit, crossing state and even national borders in the process.

"Food miles" is a term coined by Tim Lang — a professor of food policy at London's City University that describes the distance our groceries have to travel to reach us, and the energy it takes them to get there, from trucking to refrigeration and packaging. The concept is one way to quantify how much our diets are contributing to greenhouse-gas emissions and global warming.

Agriculture is directly responsible for roughly 20 percent of human-generated greenhouse-gas emissions, according to estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So how can we cut out a large chunk of that energy usage? The answer lies in our own backyard — literally.
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By buying locally, consumers make a decision to decrease the number of miles their food travels and the amount of fossil fuels needed to bring it to their plates. And buying from small, local farms also significantly reduces the amount of machinery, fertilizers and chemicals used in the process — all components of the industrial agriculture system that drastically increase the amount of fossil fuels used to grow our food.

"The typical American meal bought locally is going to use a quarter of the energy in transportation as the same meal bought from long-distance sources," says Brian Halweil, a researcher at Worldwatch Institute and author of “Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket.” "So you eat local and you basically eliminate about three-quarters of the oil use. And that's no small thing nowadays."

Well said.