This festive season, Friends of the Earth invites you to take a holiday in your home and eat locally! From December 24 to January 1, participants from all over Australia will be taking the challenge to feast on foods grown in their bioregion, and to share their experiences, recipes and ideas online.
Eating locally is a delicious way to reduce your impact on the environment, while supporting local farmers and food producers, invigorating your local economy and strengthening relationships in your community. While some participants in the Local Food Feast will be taking the full, seven-day challenge of eating from their local ‘foodshed’, we invite you to take the challenge of eating entirely locally for a day, a meal or as much as you can!
Here’s how you can get started:
1. Take the challenge – commit to eating locally over the Festive Season, and have a think about what will be ‘local’ for you – it might be your state, your region (the ‘South-east’), your bioregion (the Adelaide Plains) or a watershed. Register to participate with joel.catchlove@foe.org.au, or on 08 8227 1399!
2. Write about your experiences! Share your plans, challenges, recipes and ideas on your blog, or by emailing or posting your photos and work for inclusion on the Local Food Feast website.
3. Ease yourself into it – when you go shopping, ask and explore whether there’s a local alternative to what you’re buying. Begin to replace your diet with equivalents grown closer to home. Ask your grocer, butcher, shop assistant or store manager whether they know where particular foods are grown or from.
4. Grow your own – now’s the time to start planting for your summer garden! You can source good organic seeds from your local
Seed Savers Network, or organisations like the
Diggers Club, and vegetable seedlings are available weekly from
farmer’s markets and plant nurseries.
The Urban Orchard is a monthly homegrown fruit and vegetable exchange initiated by
Friends of the Earth and the Goodwood Goodfood Co-op and provides a community network for redistributing surplus backyard produce.
5. Visit farmers’ markets –
Friends of the Earth is developing a quick guide to local food producers and processors. In the meantime however, get to know what’s available by visiting your local farmers market, whether that’s at Willunga, the Adelaide Showgrounds, the Barossa Valley, the Riverland, or beyond!
6. Be inspired – for more information on eating local, check out Friends of the Earth’s
infosheet “Going local: community food for a clean climate”. There are also a number of great books exploring the local eating, including
Coming home to eat by Gary Paul Nabhan;
Plenty by Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon;
Eat Here by Brian Halweil;
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan,
Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel and
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. A number of websites from North America also celebrate local foods:
The 100 Mile Diet Society,
Eat Local Challenge and
Locavores.
