So how do you minimise your “tucker footprint”? By buying local, and organic. But the greenest solution – in every sense – is growing your own. There is no act more gratifying, more basic, more liberating, than to coax organically grown food from the Earth and to prepare for your family.

• Humans once lived closely with the world around them.
• These days our gardens are the only contact most of us have with the natural world.
• You need only look at children’s faces when they pick their first apple to realise how deep in the human psyche is the need to grow things.
• The salad you ate for lunch yesterday may have used more fossil fuel than you used all week.
• Your snow peas may have flown from Zimbabwe; your vacuum-packed greens brought from China, which was where the garlic came from, too.
• Your salad’s “energy miles” also included the fuel needed to grow it.
• That salad probably used more water than you did, as well. (Only about 3 per cent of water use is domestic).
• What’s the use of turning off lights and cutting back on travel kilometres if your garlic and greens came from China?
• Get exceptional taste and freshness, strengthen your local economy, support endangered family farms, safeguard your family’s health, and protect the environment.

Buying organic, locally grown food reduces global warming emissions and helps protect the environment.

Interested in eating local and need some tips?

EatLocalChallenge

FoodRoutes

• Grow food in a window box, your yard, or a community garden.
• Compost your kitchen scraps and use them as fertilizer.
• Encourage your neighbour’s to grow food and share your homegrown food with each other.
• Support local farmers, shrink your carbon footprint, and enjoy very fresh food by buying fruit, vegetables, herbs, bread, and other food at your local farmers’ market.

Local Harvest Farmers’ Markets

ACSA, (for Community Supported Agriculture) is a way for the food buying public to create a relationship with a farm and to receive a weekly basket of produce.

By making a financial commitment to a farm, people become “members” (or “shareholders,” or “subscribers”) of the CSA.

Sustainable Table

Eat Well Guide

100 Mile Diet – local eating for global change

• Natural packaging (like banana skins) is always better than plastic.
• Still a quarter of our food ends up in landfill.
• So buy only what you need.
• Another way to shift your thinking about food—and save a lot of money—is to stop throwing it away.
• According to the EPA, Americans alone put a staggering 14 million tons of food into the garbage every year. That’s about 100 pounds a person.
• Using meat—most of the time—as a seasoning, rather than a main dish, will save you big bucks on your food budget.
• If you eat meat, buy certified organic “free-range” raised animals.
• According to the EPA, “there are approximately 450,000 AFOs (Animal feeding operations – livestock-raising operations, such as hog, cattle and poultry farms, that confine and concentrate animal populations) in the United States.
• About 6,600 of these operations fall into the largest category and are referred to as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).”
• Choose organic, non-enriched flour.
• Can substitute regular flour with; coconut flour, spelt flour, rice flour, brown rice flour, gluten free flour, tapioca flour, potato flour, rye flour, teff flour, oat flour, sorghum flour, barley flour, chestnut flour, buckwheat flour etc.
• Since it is solid most of the time at room temperature (in Northern Europe) or when refrigerated, organic virgin coconut oil can be used as a butter or margarine substitute for spreads or for baking. Most recipes calling for butter, margarine, or any other oil can be substituted with coconut oil.
   
  Consider using a solar cooker to cook some of your meals.
• Non-GMO … There are many organizations that are working to protect our food supply from genetically engineered produce.
• Please get involved in any way you can.
• But there is also another hope for the gardenless.

Find your nearest community garden; where you’ll be welcome to plant your own crops.

Australia
USA
UK The Federation of City Farms and Gardens encourages, advises and helps community gardens and provides a starter pack that tells you how to find a site, raise money, enlist volunteers, get training and meet legal requirements.

• The UK, Western Europe and the USA now have well developed and cohesive city farm and community garden movements.
• In the UK, community gardens and city farms are backed by the National Federation of City Farms. The organisation has received funding from the Department of the Environment offers valuable support and advisory services to groups seeking to secure access to land.
• The Federation was an inspiration to Dr Darren Phillips in setting up the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network – later to be shortened to the Australian Community Gardens Network – in the mid-1990s.

Tucker Choices

environmentally responsible, safe seafood
organic and locally grown fruits and vegetables
organic meat, poultry and dairy
eat more organic vegetarian meals
eat less meat 

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