tuesday = chooseday

This week's choice: local or organic?

Ok, that one is a trick. Ideally we should be choosing local AND organic. Here's why:

Local food is good for so many reasons. The obvious one is that buying local reduces the distance our food has to travel from field to market. Shorter distances mean less transportation costs and a smaller carbon footprint. Local food also spends fewer days in transport, so goods can be picked closer to ripeness and require less packaging, cushioning, refrigeration and so on and so on and so on. Literally, it is the difference between a semi truck full of ethelene-gassed green tomatoes and Farmer Joe hauling his wagon of vine-ripened goodness to your door. Or close to it. ;-)

The less-obvious argument for buying local is the economic impact that your purchase has on your local economy. Not only are you helping the farmer, you are helping everyone that they do business with along the way. They say that a dollar spent locally equals $7 (by the time it changes hands in the community), but a dollar spent at a big-box store turns over only twice.

As for organic...where do I start? Maybe I should save that for another day.