Healthy Living Eating Seasonally & Sourcing Locally Writer / Meredith lacocca Photography Provided
When you think of your local Farmer’s Market, you probably don’t get as excited to go in the dead of winter than you would during the peak of summer. Fresh tomatoes! Sweet Corn! Peppers galore! Yes, the summer seasons of produce do provide us with some beautiful, tasty produce. But what about the rest of the year? We tend to forget that there still is delicious produce to be had all through the year. It’s easy to miss what’s close by and why it’s so important, maybe because we have the enormous privilege and ability to have almost any type of food all year round. Tropical fruit, avocados, berries, you name it. It is absolutely a privilege that not all countries have. But why does it matter to eat seasonally? It’s so much easier to just run to the store and grab what you need. Sourcing your food seasonally and locally, however, can have great nutritional and economic advantages. Let’s first take a deeper look at how your food gets from the field to your plate. If you’re buying an avocado in January in the Midwest, chances are that avocado is coming from Mexico or even south America. Picked from the trees, packed into trucks, sent to a packaging facility, then to a distributor, a retailer and finally, to you. Hundreds, probably even thousands of miles away. That’s no short trip! Now think about transportation. How many miles did that avocado really travel? What
