quote of the day/HMN meeting tonight!

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

~Native American Proverb

Our Holistic Moms Network meeting tonight is over the importance of eating locally grown foods. Did you know that about 3,000 acres of farmland is lost everyday to development!?!?! Come out and join us in the north atrium of the Moore Medical Center at 6:30 pm and find out how you can make a difference in the world and in your health just by eating local : ) Angela, from the Oklahoma Food Co-op will be our guest speaker.

This is a repost from a previous blog and describes what we will be talking about tonight:

Why eat local?

It’s easier to control what goes into your body. You have no idea what pesticides are used and the route taken to grow and transport produce from another country to our local supermarket.

Local food tastes better. Farmers who sell direct to local consumers do not have to worry about packing, shipping, and shelf-life issues so they can instead focus on selecting, growing, and harvesting crops to ensure peak qualities of nutrition, freshness, and taste.

Eating locally means eating seasonally which is how we keep our bodies in tune with Mother Nature.

Local food is safer. Even if it is not organic, small farms are less likely than large factory farms to douse their crops with chemicals.

Eating locally reduces global warming. The average fresh food on our dinner tables travels around 1,500 miles to get there. Just think of all the fuel you are saving when you buy from a farmer in your own community.

Eating local food means helping your local economy. On average, farmers receive about 20 cents of each food dollar spent. The rest goes for packaging, processing, marketing, transporting, and let’s not forget the distributor and retailer’s profits. As a dairy farmer, I know all about this. We get around 80 cents per gallon when we sell our milk through a dairy “coop”. It’s very frustrating to know how much hard work goes into producing the milk and who is actually profiting from it.