The perennial argument of which is greener, Organic or Local food?
This is a new discussion based around an
old ecolocal post by
Jane. My view is that Local food is better, even if it's not Organic, the lesser food miles still count. In that respect, the
100 Mile Diet is great resource for eating local if you're in the United States. For those of us in the UK, have a look at this postcode-based search engine for local producers.
Elsewhere, there are more and more articles cropping up on the web about this issue, like this one:
"Sometimes, though, local versus organic is a false choice--sometimes you can't find organic, or the local choice is bad"
The more I read, the more the 'local' choice is the better one, especially now that more and more supermarkets are pushing organic food in large quantities, causing the producers to cut corners once again.
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Hi Victoria
Hopefully some of the main links in the article and comments above will be a good help for you.
There are very few foods where organic has proven health benefits, but milk is one.
There tend to be 2 main schools of thoughts - those that are organic because they don't want the toxins in their body (who knows what the long term effects of them are - is this, in part, what's leading to the increase in a lot of diseases and illnesses such as cancer and asthma?) and then those who do it for environmental reasons. Those that fall into the latter group (such as myself, although I don't like the idea of the toxins) will also weigh up the food miles that goods have travelled - not just fresh fruit and veg, where it is easy to find out the origins, but packaged / processed goods (where do the ingredients for your favourite biscuits come from? Have the potatoes in your crisps come from the US?) and as a consequence try hard to buy unprocessed goods. There is a lot of baking and cooking goes on in our house and we have our own vegetable patch, as a consequence we can buy a lot of organic and locally produced goods, which is the best of both worlds.
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