The Common Ground ~ Celebrating Our Local Organic Harvest

Celebrating Our Local Organic Harvest

It's August and we're surrounded by summer's bounty. Our local harvest’s fragrance, color and variety are irresistible, and their taste, delectable. Feeling on this matter seems nearly universal. Few would choose mangoes trucked up from Mexico over freshly picked peaches from orchards just down the road.

But there are more reasons to buy local produce than satisfying our palates. Buying local food reduces energy consumption. The average piece of US grown produce travels a staggering 1,200-1,500 miles from source to supermarket. And this is taking into account only US grown products - these distances are substantially longer when we take into consideration produce imported from Mexico, Asia, Canada, South America, and other far-off places. Just think about the waste of energy involved - from transportation and refrigeration to packaging and preservatives - and the effect on climate and air quality of burning all those fossil fuels. In order to survive the long journey (four to seven days for domestic produce), fragile fruits and vegetables must be picked unripe, with the most delicate and often tastiest varieties left off the trucks. Sadly, the farmers, whose food goes from field-to-packaging-plant-to-broker-tobuyer-to-trucker-to-grocery chain, sees little of the money spent on the other end.

Food grown for local markets, even when not organic, is generally produced with fewer synthetic chemicals (pesticides, insecticides, fungicides, fertilizers and preservatives), which threaten the health of our environment and our bodies. Small family farms tend to take a less chemically intensive approach to agriculture than their big industrial cousins. Also, much of the produce purchased out of season comes from other countries, often with laxer health and environmental standards than our own.

Another benefit of buying local produce is that we're supporting biodiversity, since small family farms are more likely to grow a variety of crops. Unlike large industrial farms, they don't stick with miles of Red Delicious. Instead, they grow the varieties of each crop best suited to their corner of the world. This helps to preserve a wider gene pool, both within agriculture and in the wild, which is critical for our long-term food security.

Finally, when we buy local produce, we help to keep local farmers in business. That's not just neighborly, it's good for our local economy. And it's one more way to keep our productive farmland open and undeveloped. Buying locally grown produce keeps more of the money we spend in state, boosting local economies and paying off the mortgages of the hard-working farmers who work the land. These farmers, in turn, can buy more land, raise more crops and, hopefully, thwart the outcropping of yet another development of formulaic cluster homes. (America loses more than a million acres of farm and ranch land to development each year.)

When it comes to flavor, nutrition and a socially and environmentally conscious framework of production and distribution, look no further than the local and organic produce section at Common Ground. We care about where all our products come from and the kinds of landscapes and communities they encourage. We take pride in helping our neighbors to carry home a conscientious market bag heavy with fresh fruits and vegetables of incomparable flavor and nutritional value.