Eating Local… Really Local

Eating local and knowing where your food comes from is something we hear about more and more.  It is something we should all pay a little more attention too as there are many benefits to eating local, not to mention it’s important to know where your food comes from.  We have all become dependent on grocery stores to provide us with our food and in doing so, people are losing sight of where our food comes from and kids think food “grows on shelves.”  We have become a society where we care more about what something costs as opposed to where it comes from.  The “Eat Local” movement is trying to remedy this by making us think twice about the food we buy and consume. 

Here’s an interesting watch if you have a few minutes.

Some people take the whole eating local thing to the extreme defining local as a certain radius around the area they live;  have your ever seen or heard of the 100 Mile Challenge show on Food Network??  For many Canadians limiting what we consume to food that was grown or harvested in a 100 Mile radius would make eating a healthy balanced diet difficult.  We consider anything Canadian to be local; if I’m at the grocery store and I have a choice to buy an apple grown in Canada vs. the States, I’ll take the Canadian apple.

With a garden, we know exactly where our food comes from and it can’t get much more local than your back yard.  The wonderful thing about gardening is you can grow as much or as little as you want; you can have a huge garden with multiple vegetables or you can grow a few different vegetables in pots on your deck or apartment balcony.  The only problem with our garden is that it only provides us with vegetables; it doesn’t provide us with any meat.  It may be food for meat, but it can’t grow meat.

Last fall after the garden had been harvested and put to sleep another type of harvest began; a harvest that would add some meat to all the veggies in the freezer, a harvest also referred to as hunting season.  By the end of hunting season we had successfully harvested three deer leaving our freezer close to overflowing with vegetables and meat that we knew exactly where they came from.  In fact, one of the deer came from the green belt directly south of our acreage. 

Now we can proudly boast, at times, that we had a 100 Mile Meal, and depending on what deer meat we eat, a One Mile Meal.