50 Reasons to Eat & Grow Local Food
Reason #3
Eating local food gives you control over an important aspect of your life. You are what you eat! Taking control over the food you and your family eat is a serious first step toward other changes in your life. The feeling of accomplishment and success you will feel at the end of the 50 days of local eating will encourage further changes in your own previously-unquestioned habits masked as ‘life-choices’ (but are really conventions thrust upon us by outside forces).
Here are some examples I’ve encountered; most require something that we’ve been trained away from in our ‘just-in-time’ culture: forethought.
- Walking or biking to work or to do your shopping, whatever the weather.
- Planning your trips ahead of time so you can make multiple stops instead of driving out and back 4 or 5 times per day for single tasks.
- Planning your baking on colder days, and using the oven to cook several dishes at once.
- Walk onto the ferry and take the bus on the other side, or hitch a ride. It’s cheaper and reduces the amount of energy needed to run that ‘floating parking lot’.
- Thinking ahead and soaking beans and rice that will diminish cooking times, and avoid using tinned food.
- Doing your laundry on an early, sunny morning so you can hang it out to dry (at least partially) throughout the day, and taking it off the line before the cool sets in.
- Making your commitment overtly political: Vote with your dollars, your ballot, lead by example and voice your concerns — all year long. On that note, you may want to run for City Council or Mayor of Powell River… you have between Oct 4 and 14th to get your nomination in. Info here: https://powellriver.civicweb.net/Documents/DocumentList.aspx?ID=1874 ) to help change outdated 50′s era laws (like the no-clotheslines bylaws in certain areas) created during a time when there was almost no consciousness of the problem with rampant energy consumption.
Site Managed by Rabideye.com
