Rhadhika Sri Paravastu, India “What strikes me most is that most farmers in my state are moving away from farming to pursue daily wage jobs as they do not have sufficient customers to grow crops for the local community.”
Eat local and native. Foods that are grown close to home will be produced in-season, keeping with the rhythms of creation. Native foods will preserve the web of life in a local area. These foods will also support smaller-scale farmers.
BLOG
Eating local and native foods encourages the economy in your community to work with the rhythms of creation. In addition, it encourages connections between people, as consumers seek and meet farmers among their neighbors.
The connections to nature and neighbors reinforce each other.
As Pope Francis said in Laudato Si’, his encyclical letter on climate change and creation, “Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live. . . We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.” (139)
Adding local and native foods to your diet is one step toward solving these crises. Local foods are grown in season, without the intensive intervention needed to grow summer-season foods over the winter or vice versa. Native foods fill important niches in the web of life present in your region.
Meeting local producers develops relationships and builds an economy that sustains creation.