Why Locally-Grown Food?

Elpasonaturally promotes buying and eating more locally grown foods. There are a variety of reasons for doing so. First, locally grown food is better tasting and more nutritious food. Food loses some of its nutritional value as it travels. The hot house tomato grown in California doesn’t have as much oomph to it by the time it has been shipped across country to be packaged and distributed to a warehouse in Phoenix and then shipped to El Paso. If you have ever eaten a locally-grown heirloom tomato, you will know the depth of the taste of a real love apple. Your body will thank you for all the additional vitamins and minerals.

Buying locally grown food means energy independence. You can buy blueberries now in grocery stores that were grown in Chile, shipped to New York and shipped out to different food distribution centers in the country before they make it to your local grocery store that may be miles away from where you live because the design of our cities and neighborhoods are still predicated on cheap energy.

Using more organic and sustainable farming practices means once again relying on the sun and not on petroleum. Tons of food is currently raised on corporate farms because of insecticides and herbicides that are produced by the petroleum industry. (All of those noxious chemicals make their way into our food and water.)

Locally grown food is demonstrably safer food. There is a reason for the widespread havoc wreaked by food contaminated by E coli or salmonella. There are only a few points of distribution and mega farms, thanks to federal subsidies, along with a very few super markets and big box stores rule our food chain. If contamination starts on the large corporate farm or at the food distributor, it quickly spreads nationally. Imagine a terrorist strike on our food system!

El Pasoans would be wise to encourage their governments to offer incentives for more small farmers raising food crops. Urban sprawl that does not have a policy for maintaining land for agriculture is a policy for eventual unsustainability of the human culture and community.

We need a return to more locally grown food with more places for that food to be sold especially in neighborhood farmers markets. We need to learn again about our indigenous foods besides just pecans. Many know about diabetes-fighting nopal (and many El Pasoans grow and harvest their own nopalitos and tunas.) But there is also the high protein mesquite bean and ubiquitous amaranth. Local churches and schools with commercial kitchens could become neighborhood canning facilities. Each neighborhood park could have just a patch for a community garden and neighbors can also join together for yardsharing.

With the economy in the tank, with the need for energy independence (can you imagine small wind mills generating electricity at each neighborhood facility?), with the need to eat more nutritious food and be free of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, strokes and cancer, the value for locally-grown and eaten food could certainly come to be shared by more people in the El Paso region.

Elpasonaturally is dedicated to the promotion of this value.