Eat Local. Everyone's Doing It!

Much to my annoyance, when I type “eat local” into my internet search engine, I am swamped with results (at last count, Google brought up over 42,500,000 links), which leaves me slogging through hundreds of pages of only somewhat relevant information. In the midst of all my toil, I have discovered several Eat Local movements which are floating about on the internet. Judging by the flurry of posts on these sites, thousands have taken them up with fervor, some making commitments to eat locally for as short as a month and others as long as a year. One of the most prominent movements is the Eat Local Challenge, which has in turn birthed smaller, related movements such as the Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge and One Local Summer. There is also the The 100-Mile Diet (with its accompanying book) and the Food Routes Buy Local Challenge. And then, if you haven’t had enough yet, there is Support Farms Buy Local Challenge and Eat Local Challenge (Not terribly original, this crowd).

The one thing these challenges don’t require of their participants is that the food they obtain also be organic. Which leads me to the question: Is a conventionally grown green pepper from close to home better than an organic green pepper grown 1,000 miles away? The Eat Local movement seems to think so, and admittedly, there are some great incentives to buying local. Just the same, I would like to prove that it's not necessary to have to choose one over the other.

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