Local food, sustainable community

With all the doom and gloom surrounding the environmental issues that we are bombarded with each and every day, many people think their opinion doesn't matter. Wrong! I feel that by supporting local farmers and ethical businesses we can build sustainable communities providing local people with living wages and opportunities. Being a chef and local restaurant owner, my primary focus is, of course, on food.

In the Central Susquehanna Valley where I live we are blessed with some of the nicest farmland in the country. I am like a kid in candy shop when visiting the farms that my products come from. It is very exciting to watch the process of food being provided to the community, straight from the farm to the fork!

How can buying local food help our environment? Well there are many reasons that buying local is important, the most obvious being a lowered carbon footprint of the food we eat. Since we have to eat every day, we make many decisions and there is plenty of opportunity to vote with our dollars. The average food item travels over 1,500 miles from farm to table resulting in increased energy costs associated with transportation and packaging. Keeping farms economically viable is also critical to preserving our beautiful rural landscapes and preventing overdevelopment. Buying local food helps ensure that farmland can remain active well into the future.