Getting started....

Hey y'all I started this blog to bring together information on the importance of eating local and supporting small farms. Being from a long line of farmers I know the hard work and dedication it takes to run a small farm or even a small garden. With all the turmoil and hardships the U.S. has faced recently I think its even more important to support the community you live in. By eating local and in season foods you are reducing your carbon imprint, putting money back in your community, eating delicious more nutritional foods, saying yes to sustainable agriculture and no to agribusiness. Local or homegrown food just tastes better than anything you can get from the grocery store!
Typical produce thats found in your grocery store was bred for shipping. Once refridgerated shipping went mainstream (about the middle of the 20th century) taste went out the window. Only the toughest, blemish free, and uniform crops are selected. On average each component of an american meal has traveled 1,500 miles to get to your plate, not including the amount of energy spent processing that item! If each person in the U.S. ate just one organic locally produced meal it would reduce the country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil PER WEEK! Think about that for a second; each out of season fruit or vegetable had to be shipped from a country in another hemisphere.... so is that tasteless mealy tomato in winter really worth it? I'm not saying to go without your favorite produce, but a more efficient (and cheaper) way to have delectable tomatoes you'd find in say... your local farmer's market during the summer.... would be to can them. Canning isn't just for your grandmother! If you stock up on whats in season now and put it away you could be eating the most nutritious and best tasting produce all year!

Another thing that became uniform was the way produce "SHOULD" look. If you asked a child what color an apple is they would say red, a carrot orange, tomato red, cauliflower white, ect. Now each of those items comes in hundreds of different sizes, colors and shapes that have been reduced to only a few commercial varieties. The rest of the produce only still exists thanks in large part to seed saving farmers and some seed companies that preserve heirloom varieties. If you looked at what kinds of heirloom varieties are out there you would be amazed to know the original cauliflower was purple, carrots range from white to dark red, tomatoes come in every color of the rainbow except maybe blue, apples can be pale yellow to almost brown with variations all in between! Those colorful heirlooms contain more nutrition like antioxidants than the conventional version, so you get more bang for your buck. In a society that is so concerned with health and nutrition why have we overlooked the most basic component? You really are what you eat!