Eating at home is an adventure, a challenge, an educational experience, and best of all, tasty & nutritious!

Nearly 20 people enjoyed MUD's "Plan Your Local Diet" workshop on November 15. Stories of a year spent eating within 100 miles of Missoula were interspersed with tips on where to get food locally, food preservation, and more. Discussion was accompanied by a local dinner complete with turkey, stuffing, butternut squash soup, apple cider, and pumpkin pie. Children and adults alike enjoyed a delicious local meal while thinking about how to localize their own diets.

WHY EAT LOCALLY?
The following points on eating locally are adapted from one of the workshop hand-outs.
Support the local economy: The average food item in the United States has traveled between 1,500-2,500 miles before it reaches your plate. Money spent on local food undergoes the "multiplier effect," circulating multiple times in the local economy. It supports not just the grocer or farmer, but in turn those businesses that the farmers support, and so on. Larger percentages of the "food dollar" are also directly received by the producers, rather than filtering through the hands of marketing, distributing, processing, and corporation interests first.
Connect with local farmers and ranchers: Small, family-owned farms and ranches in Montana are declining due to development pressures and economic issues related to agriculture commodities, international competition, and more. Purchasing directly from local producers, or from local grocers and co-ops is literally putting your money where your mouth is. When you get to know "your farmer," you have an opportunity to build relationships, support community discussion, and to see first hand how your food is grown or raised, how it is processed, and what is or isn't in it.
Reduce impact on ecosystems: Eating is something we are fortunate to do multiple times every day of our lives. Each time we eat, we make choices about what we are introducing into our bodies. Likewise, our choices impact whether chemicals are applied to plants, damage insect populations, enter waterways, build up in fat cells in animals, etc. Our choices affect the amount of fossil fuels necessary to get our food from where it was harvested to our plates, and also affect whether that food was grown in a rain forest clear-cut, in an agriculturally diverse farm, or in a vast monoculture in the midwest. We often do not see the impact of our food choices, when we choose foods from far away. When we purchase local foods, we can more easily understand the ecological significance of agricultural practices. We are then more readily able to decide which practices we choose to support, and which we choose to, literally, consume.
Improve health and satisfy taste buds: When our meals consist of fresh, locally produced ingredients, we are maximizing on their nutritional and flavor values. Foods, even when they are raw, loose nutritional value as they they wait between harvest and being eaten. When fresh foods are designed to grow uniformly, with stereotypically large, shiny and attractive appearance, to last for weeks or months without spoiling, and to withstand 100s to 1000s of miles of travel without bruising, their nutritional content is often sacrificed. The same holds true for flavor. It is not true that market durability prevents nutrition and flavor, but it is true that they are often not equal concerns in commercial markets. When food is harvested and eaten locally, farmers don't have to worry about storage and durability. They can shift their focus to plant varieties conditioned over time to taste great at peak freshness and to have high nutrient values.

Food that you recognize, that's good for you and the environment, supports the local economy and tastes great - it's a win/win situation!

For more information on local diets, contact the MUD office or see the resources section of this website.