Eating locally is touted as the new organic. Why? Most discussions revolve around food miles and environmental impact. But suppose those are not the most important reasons for eating locally.

 

Here on our farm we talk about vitamin “L” and vitamin “S”. Vitamin L is the energy we get from living in beauty. It is the landscape vitamin. Most of us know it when we see it. Rolling fields...grazing animals--from which we derive a sense of place, peacefulness, a calming beauty. 

 

Vitamin S is the vitamin of spirituality. An innate, if unspoken, sense that this earth we look at is what we are made of, if only we eat of it. All of us seem to have a need to be a part of something bigger than us, to connect to where we live and with the people who share our community. Local food is the basis for real communion, with that place, with our neighbors.

 

Some speak of local in terms of miles. A 200 mile radius is about 120,000 square miles. (which happens to be about a million acres). Since a million acres will meet all the food needs of about 200,000 people and only a few folks are trying to eat locally, the concept of a 200 mile diet would seem bizarre.) The much mentioned 100 mile diet means your food can come from an area of 30,000 square miles, a bit more believable but still an awfully big number. I would suggest we define local in hours, not miles. If it takes an eight hour round trip in a car to see the fields from which we eat, it is highly unlikely many folks will get much vitamin L or vitamin S. 

 

A one hour trip to see our foodscape is about as big an area folks are actually likely to enjoy. A fifty mile radius is about as far as most people can travel in one hour. That still gives us over 7,500 square miles in which to find sustenance.

 

Here on our farm we grow wine. Many others have grapes trucked hundreds of miles. Every bottle of wine made creates about a pound of waste. That waste can be spread in our fields or trucked away to a landfill. We and the friends who drink our wine also drink in the landscape secure in the knowledge that energy is not being wasted trucking grapes or waste. We all stand on the land and know that we are drinking its fruits, becoming one with the land and each other. We know that local can only come from fields you can see, hands you can shake. So, please, it is incredibly easy to enrich your life and pleasure. Eat and drink at least once a year, if not once a week from the fields and hands that are truly local.

 

If you insist on purely an environmental reason for eating locally consider the fuel costs and carbon footprint of food that requires an eight hour round trip to get to you. But I urge you to go beyond the intellectual reasons for eating truly local food. Feed your emotional and spiritual self and you will be truly fulfilled.