GOOD Transparency: How Far Your Produce Travels
From the transparency:
“Buying fruits and vegetables from local farmers’ markets not only supports local agriculture, but also saves countless pounds of carbon emissions, since your food has not been shipped from afar to your supermarket. It’s not always easy to buy local, but from an emissions perspective, it might be worth it. This is a look at the average distance that produce travels in the United States—from where it’s grown, to where it’s sold.”
I’ll be honest: for many, many years of my life, I didn’t care where my food came from. If it was in the grocery store, it was good enough for me.
In the past year or so (maybe a little before that), I’ve become acutely aware of the impact that my eating habits have had not only on my own body, but on the world around me, and I’ve made some changes in the way I live my life in order to better reflect my ethics and move towards a type of life where I’m more cognizant of the things I consume.
As part of that transformation (along with significantly cutting down my meat consumption to the point where it is almost non-existent), I’ve started to be extremely conscious over where my food is coming from. As a first step, I now do most of my weekly grocery shopping at the Arlington Farmers’ Market where all the vendors are actual producers (no middle-men) from a 125-mile radius.
I know it’s not much, and I’ve got a lot more to do to really get to a point where what I’m consuming reflects the way I’d like to live, but I feel as though it’s a good start. It may not be for everyone, but it makes me happy to know that I’m slowly doing what works for me.
