This week my favorite Food Bank had all-you-can-eat strawberries, plus an abundance of raspberries. Not thinking much beyond "yum!" I grabbed a bunch... and was reminded why I can sometimes be such a locavore. The strawberries were from California and just about had enough flavor to be worth hauling up the hill -- since I was going anyway -- but the raspberries were all seeds and red water, not really even worth carrying from bowl to mouth. Granted, some of that was my fault, since they got pretty squished riding home in my panniers.
The point is, the farther food travels and the longer it sits in a distributor's warehouse, the older it gets. And with any kind of produce, the older it's going to get, the earlier it has to be picked and the less flavor it has time to develop. This is the best reason to buy your food directly from local farmers as much as possible.
Other reasons include the economic -- buying locally keeps your money "at home" -- and the ecological -- all those interstate trucks and international planes do nasty things to the air quality.
Don't get me wrong, I still love the food bank and am grateful to them, they just sometimes have things that aren't much good. In fact, one of the coolest things about the food bank is the chance to try stuff you'd never risk spending money on.
Esperanta traduko: this post is also available in Esperanto, because Dana is a language geek.
