Eating locally and in season
Eating seasonal products is an easier commitment to maintain when favouring local producers. Buying responsibly is about supporting local farmers and adapting your diet to the environment and not the other way around. However, eating locally requires changing your diet a bit and its organisation. Read on for more about this trend disrupting local economies.
The impact of transportation
According to the INRA, 17% of greenhouse gas emissions from food come from transportation: by choosing to buy local products, consumers have an undeniable impact. However, the definition of local can vary: is it within the district? The region? 100km? Or simply products from your own country? Behind the term local hides many understandings depending on where you live and how harsh winter is - as it affects the quality of fruits and vegetables you have access to. Additionally, there are tropical products which are hard to consume locally: tea, coffee, spices, chocolate… they all come from far away. These are called the ‘Marco Polo exemptions’: in those instances, favour products which travel by boat and try to have fun picking them locally too. Infusion rather than tea, chicory or roasted barley tea rather than coffee… enough to bring variety to your plate!
Other distribution routes
If some supermarkets try to supply closest to them, local producers favour a shorter route, reducing the number of intermediaries as much as possible. It can be direct sale (to a business), selling to an AMAP (Society to Support Peasant Agriculture), a market (make sure you are dealing with a producer directly not a reseller) or producer shops. Everybody wins!
Fill up once a year
Choosing to eat only seasonal fruits and vegetables means knowing how to store them out of season in order to keep eating them! In full season, production can be particularly fruitful: apples turned into applesauce; tomatoes simmered into sauces sterilised in jars; jams when fruits are ripe… This is when they have to be cooked and stored as canned or frozen goods: ask your local producer to find out when his or her products will be ripe! At the height of their quality and taste (nature does its job well), seasonal products from nearby are extra-fresh which makes them even more delicious. It explains the number of transformation plants (for canned or frozen goods) around farming exploitations and producers to best preserve the products at its peak. Thanks to intense harvests, we can enjoy them all year long.