purchase consciously: organic, local, fair trade...

Just think more about where what you are eating is coming from, and how it has to grow. You can improve the environment by just eating local in season foods when you can, and doing what you can to preserve those foods when they are at their best.

Let me count the ways…
10 – locally grown chicken
1/2 – of a locally grown, grass fed cow
5 quarts of our own black berries frozen.
3 quarts of local raspberrys frozen.
3 quarts of local blue berries frozen.

a few of our own cukes, and tomatoes.
Many stops to the farmers market on Saturdays, or stops at the farm stand on my way home. Now is when the rubber has to hit the road; and I need to take advantage of late summer bounty.
Time to freeze corn, dry tomatoes, sauce tomatoes, and make pickles.
Put up the local food for later enjoyment.

After some reading (Botany of desire, Omnivores Dilemma, Fast food nation) I’ve got the idea that having our food fly / trucked around the world might not be the best thing I can do for our environment. There’s a great local farm (lull farm) where we can get local produce nearly all year round (we are still getting local taters, apples, onions, garlic, carrots, squash, canned tomatoes, and other good stuff.
While I do not know if they are organic, I’m sure the apples are not, IMHO local tops organic in this case. In addition, I’ve started paying a lot more attention to what’s in what I eat. It’s amazing, even simple items like bread crumbs can have a list an arms length… when all that should be in there is flour, water, yeast, salt… scary!

Fall in New England. You can’t pass a farm stand without seeing pumpkins, bushels of apples, winter squash, and all the other winter storage foods. Today we stopped at a farm stand and bought a peck of apples, and a loaf of fresh bread. Stopped at another and bought some sugar pumpkins, and stopped at one more for Kabocha pumpkins. When we got home I made a batch of apple sauce, and followed it up with a large pot of pumpkin soup. Nothing better than fresh fall produce.
AO

local:
Tomatoes
cucumbers
lettuce
squash
radishes
chard
beef
eggs
milk
corn
onions

This is my favorite time of year.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6286606.stm

Drinking tap water instead of bottled water. Why? Because it’s better for the environment.

I stopped by the local farm stand yesterday.
Got a quart of strawberries, rhubarb, baby peas, and lettuce.
Get this… they left the stand and went out back to cut the lettuce, that’s how fresh it is. Awsome!

I made pad thai last night with the peapods instead of bean sprouts, and it was awsome.
AO

for Rhubarb, strawberries, spring greens, and farmers markets.
AO

While Organic means no pesticides, it does not mean low fossil fuel food. So if you have to choose between local and organic, you might be doing the environment more of a favor selecting local… food for thought.
AO

Here’s Alton Brown’s rant on the subject.
http://www.altonbrown.com/adventure/knowledge/edible_news.html

buy local…
Limit your exposure.
AO