Is Local Food only Good for the Environment? Or could it be better for People Too?

If you get right down to the root of it, that movement that tries to promote the use of local food has always been about trying to help the environment and small-holding farmers. Buy from the supermarket chains, and you usually buy from major agricultural corporations that farm vast tracts of land intensively with genetically-modified seeds, massive quantities of pesticides and petroleum-based fertilizer. And that's not even including the way the farming corporations need to truck produce all over the country expending fuel and polluting the air. Buy local food, and you hand business to local farmers who have small farms that they are able to take care of with personal attention. They don't need to depend on pesticides and fertilizer all that much.

But is local food only good for the planet? What if it were to be better for your health as well? Certainly, that would convince a whole new constituency of the benefits of organic and local food. A grant has been made to a research team at the University of North Carolina; the goal given to them is finding out more information about what impact it has on public health for a community to abandon produce from large-scale farming and to move towards local food that's been grown no more than 100 miles away from anyone's home.

If people were to focus their entire diets on local food, they would, by requirement, need to give up processed foods. That itself would be a very healthy development. Not to mention, if you have to eat nothing but local food, you'll look out for variety as much as you can - and in that quest, you will have nowhere to turn but to new kinds of fruits and vegetables that you wouldn't ever have chosen before. By that measure, the local food movement has to be better for the public health. But what they're looking for in this study is more direct evidence.

The study’s going to take until the year 2013 to really come to any provable conclusions; whatever they find in the end, we will have a better understanding of what happens when we transition to farming practices that are healthier for the environment, that use less toxic material, and that produce fresher produce. The way America eats has a lot to say about our problem with a poor environment and our health problems. Half of all Americans live with at least one chronic disease like high blood pressure or diabetes. This didn't used to be the case before. A study to understand the way America treats its food could have a lot to contribute in helping America overcome its problems with obesity and malnutrition.