Maudene Nelson, RD, CDE is a nutrition educator at the Columbia University Institute of Human Nutrition and a diabetes educator at the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center. She sat down with GetHealthyHarlem.org to explain why locally grown food is healthier for you and the economy!
Q: What does it mean to buy locally grown food?
A: Be a "locavore!" That is a person who is committed to eat as much food as possible that is grown close to where you live (or "locally"). Depending on where you live, you might select from farms that are 5 to 100 miles away from you. The reason for being a "locavore" is that the closer the food is grown to where you live, the better quality the food you'll have on your plate. The lag time between the time when food is harvested and the time that it's eaten will be shorter if you eat locally-grown foods, as opposed to foods grown in South America or California, for instance. The shorter the time in between harvesting and eating a food, the more nutrients (the healthy stuff) will remain in the food. Frozen foods, although processed, are the closest to fresh that you will find in a supermarket, because they are frozen at the time of harvest.
Q: Isn't buying local food more expensive?
Actually, a very strong reason for buying locally grown food is that you are supporting your local economy. Here's a little story for you. A while back I bought a three-layer chocolate cake from GristedesTM, which cost $14, for a coworker's last day of work. I compared it to the three-layer chocolate cake at the Carrot Top Bakery, a local bakery that's right around the corner and it cost $19. I figured I'd save five dollars and buy the cake from GristedesTM. When we turned the box over, we saw that it was baked in Texas! So my coworkers and I started thinking: we already spent the five dollars on highway taxes, fuel, and on the pollution that the truck fuel creates by transporting it all the way to New York. And, if we had bought the cake from Carrot Top bakery around the corner, we'd be supporting a small local business and putting money back into the community. So we made the decision from then on that the $5 could have made a difference so we would buy local.
I would love to say that these are thoughts I came up with on my own, but actually two books that I've read in the last year have really influenced me. They are The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. For someone who's been in the nutrition field for over thirty years, these books were extremely enlightening, inspiring, interesting and fun and it made me make changes even though I thought I had it all figured out. Another book, Food Politics, by Marion Nestle is also an excellent book.
Riverside July 27, 2010 - 1:21pm