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A Strong Local Food System...
Is good business! Local food creates local jobs and supports community economic development.
Local food supports local families. Buying locally produced food at stores or from farmers who market their products directly to consumers to get a larger share of our food dollars, helps farm families make a living wage and continue farming their land.
Local food also helps build strong communities. Research shows that people from all income groups are healthier when people from low-income groups are also healthy. Local food also helps build connections between farmers, consumers and grocers.
Sustainably produced and efficiently transported local food can be good for the environment as it travels a shorter distance, often contains less packaging, and may decrease greenhouse gas emissions. Purchasing local sustainably grown and efficiently transported food may be one way to address the increasing expense of fossil fuels and the adverse effects of global warming from increased carbon emissions.
See the Learn More and Take action buttons, top left, for more information.
Local food, when consumed in season, is often fresher than foods which have traveled from other parts of the world. Crops marketed closer to home are picked at their peak and often sold within 24 hours of harvesting. Food imported from far away must travel on trucks and planes and is stored in warehouses.
Sustainably produced local food can also preserve genetic diversity. In response to demands for lower food costs and efficiency, industrial agriculture often involves plants bred for their ability to ripen uniformly, withstand harvesting, survive packing, and last a long time on the shelf. This often results in few plant varieties being cultivated, and larger scale production. Farms using more sustainable practices often grow a wide array of crops and often also raise animals, providing genetic diversity, producing much of the farms nutrients, while adding unique flavor and color over the growing season.
Our food system will continue to be global and many Manitoba farmers and consumers rely on export markets. However when we can, eating local foods in eating in season, supporting farmers using sustainable practices and focussing on the local food economy as part of their enterprise is a great start to a more sustainable food system.
10 Reasons to Buy Manitoba's Own
8 Good Reasons to Participate in the Local Food Economy
Winnipeg Local Food Caterers and Restaurants (2011)
Health Impacts of Eating Locally - Nutrition and the 100 Mile Diet Report