Don’t look now, but you’re living on a ball spinning at 1,000 mph while traveling around the sun at 67,000 mph. Every 365 days, your little blue ball moves predictably around a giant nuclear fusion reactor floating about 93 million miles away. These celestial movements cause the spot you live on to experience what are known as “seasons.” I guess what I’m trying to say is that “seasons” are a huge part of our lives and yet…most of us probably wouldn’t know any of this from looking at our dinner plates.
Home sweet home.
After all, we can eat whatever we want, whenever we want, thanks to imported foods. There are benefits to this arrangement, but there are also drawbacks.
Where did those March blueberries come from? Who picked them and how were the workers treated? What kind of farm were they grown on and what pesticide residues are on them? How far did they travel to get to you? The answer to all of these questions is probably another question: who the heck knows?
The distance between our food and our plates also places a corresponding distance between us and our planet. The more distance, the less intimacy. We’re left with shallow transactions, not meaningful relationships. “What’s the cheapest price at which I can obtain this commodity,” versus “I’m so thankful for my friends at X Farm who grew this delicious, healthy, and safe food for me this week.”
Fall In Love With Local Food
One of our chief aims at Daily Harvest Express is to help you fall in love with your food and the people who grew it. They just so happen to be your neighbors, and they just so happen to be growing some of the best food on the entire planet. That’s why we love sharing their stories and helping you learn how to use the food they grew for you via recipes and tips.
What season do these local persimmons taste like?
Something else we love: helping you eat seasonally. In our ideal world, you could look at your dinner plate and know what season it is. Persimmons? Must be fall. Blueberries and blackberries? Late spring through early summer. Green beans? Mmm, tastes like summer.
Eating seasonally not only connects you to the world you live in and on, it also helps you increase your dietary diversity, ensuring that you get a wide variety of nutrients that are critical to your health.
So we’d like to issue you a local food challenge: during every meal you eat over the next month, include at least one serving of local, seasonal produce. This can be as simple as eating a local apple or as complex as an entire entrée made from local produce. You choose!
We love our local farmers and sharing their stories with you!
And when you’re eating your local food, be sure to note the farms it came from. Visit their websites, like their facebook and Instagram pages, and maybe even go on a farm tour. Your local farmers are amazing, brilliant, hard-working people and they’re proud of what they do–as they should be. We’re certainly proud to support them, and hope you will be too.
After one month, consider carrying your “local food challenge” forward for a whole year. Soon, eating local just becomes part of who you are; something that enriches your life in ways that words can’t quite express. Let the seasons be something that you taste as well as feel, knowing that new and delicious flavors are just weeks or months ahead if you’re patient, reminding you that you just went on another voyage around the sun on the little blue ball we all share.
We’d love to know how your local food challenge goes, so let us know!
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Get your Daily Harvest Express order placed right now (or no later than Sunday evening at 5 pm) so you can enjoy another week of fresh, healthy food from local farmers!
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