Area residents who now make a point to look for and buy locally grown food from this region’s farmers in stores, restaurants and local farmers’ markets have excellent reasons for being more careful about what they eat.
Local food is typically fresher, tastier and healthier because it’s grown more naturally and gets to market faster. It also contributes significantly to the local economy and the revival of sustainable, local farms and traditional methods of agriculture — including free-range grass-fed animals and, often, organically grown produce.
Gaining Ground, the Benwood Foundation-sponsored initiative to promote the use of locally grown food and the economic vitality it provides, has calculated, for example, that raising the percentage of spending on local food from the current 1/10th of 1 percent to 5 percent would represent $100 million in local economic development.
It would, in addition, help residents here avoid most of the health risks and toxins that have become the hallmark of industrialized corporate farming. Food giant Cargill Corp.’s massive recall last week of 38 million pounds of ground turkey meat possibly infected by an antibiotic-resistant strain of salmonella is a case in point. (We pause to wonder how much storage room it would take to house 38 million pounds, and how that meat will be disposed of.)
Cargill’s tainted turkey meat owes to the way most industrial farms treat their meat-producing animals and fowl. Like most giant industrial farms, Cargill regularly administers an array of antibiotics to its animals, whether caged or crowded into huge feedlots and buildings, to promote faster growth and to prevent or mitigate the possibility of diseases in the animals.