While looking for my research question I knew I wanted to do something related to local food and how it's better for our health and environment. Locally grown food is not the key that is going to save us from global warming and obesity, but it will lower it.
In one of my articles, Local Versus Non-Local Food: Is The Kind of Food You Eat More Important Than Where it Comes From, Mellino discusses how local food can lower down carbon dioxide emissions in the air which can help calm global warming. Most people believe that eating locally will not affect the air, but it does. Locally grown food releases less emissions than factory farmed food. Mellino used an example of a broccoli traveling to California which showed that locally grown broccoli travels less which created less emissions than the broccoli that did travel. The non-local broccoli traveled 2786.0 miles and emitted 15.3 pounds carbon dioxide per pound of broccoli delivered. The locally grown broccoli traveled 19.1 miles and emitted 0.04 pounds of carbon dioxide per pound of broccoli. This shows that locally grown food cannot lower emissions, but it can lower it.
Locally grown food is not only good for the environment, but our health. In the article Food Security: Locally Grown Food Supplies to Improve Nutrition, Hyatt explains the nutritional value of locally grown food. The article mentions that farmers don't really care about the nutritional value of a product because they focus on how it looks more. I feel like everyone can relate to this. Many times I've gotten the biggest, reddest strawberry only to find out it doesn't taste as sweet as I expected it to. There are practices that farmers have to take in order to get food high in nutrients. Most factory farmers don't seem to focus on this because they want to produce the biggest, ripest food without considering the nutrients. Local farmers follow these practices to produce delicious, nutritional food. Our bodies are more energized with these nutrients which shows that locally good food is good for our health.
I find this rather fascinating. I knew that eating locally grown food was a good thing but I thought it was only to discourage factory farmed foods because of all the things they add to the plants. The fact that locally grown food can lower the carbon dioxide emissions was pretty interesting. That is something i never knew. Things like this make me want to grow my own garden.
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