Does your food have more frequent miles than you?

Here are some compelling reasons why you should eat locally:

*Support your community
*Get the freshest, flavorful and most nutritive produce available
*Mass farming depends on fossil fuels, depletes soils, and poisons waterways
*Eating locally reduces second hand consumption of fossil fuels caused by trucking and shipping produce
*Californian lettuce eaten in NYC travels 2,993 miles
*It costs the equivalent to 11,150 calories of energy to fly a two-pound Hawaiian pineapple to Des Moines, Iowa
*If one million people switched to locally produced food for a year, we'd eliminate up to 625,000 tons of CO2.
*Long hauled food loses vitamins and gains contaminants

To reach your plate, the typical meal travels roughly 22,000 miles! Each ingredient-meat, fish, vegetables, spices, eggs, fruit, milk, grains- is trucked or flown from where it's grown to where it's packaged to where it's sold, burning fossil fuel. Add the greenhouse gases created by the production and distribution of fertilizers, antibiotics, pesticides, and so on- not to mention the environmental havoc they wreak-plus the paper, plastic and aluminum used for packaging, as well as their disposal, and you start to get the big picture. Everything you consume has a profound effect on Mother Earth!

Inspired by the "Global Warming Survival Handbook" by David De Rothschild