November 19, 2009 at 1:54 pm
· Filed under Food Deserts, Health, Urban Agriculture
America should increase its regional food consumption. Each metropolitan area, the researchers say, should obtain most of its nutrition from its own “foodshed,” a term akin to “watershed” meaning the area that naturally supplies its kitchens. Moreover, in a novel suggestion, the MIT and Columbia team says these local efforts should form a larger “Integrated Regional Foodshed” system, intended to lower the price and caloric content of food by lowering distances food must travel, from the farm to the dinner table.
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Seaseal wrote @ November 29th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
This concept is in direct contradiction with today’s corporate food distribution system, so creating foodsheds will be difficult. Now, where I live in Central Coast California, newly harvested celery or broccoli or lettuce gets loaded on trucks for a 750 mile trip to the L.A. distribution center. It is then loaded on another truck to drive back to the local Safeway–a 1500 mile round trip.
Those vegetables are no longer fresh, and more importantly, are most likely grown using conventional ag practices on land leased by large multinational corporations, not local farmers. To break up this system and return ag land to local farms for diverse crops rather than chemically treated mono-crops will be a big undertaking, so we better get started soon.
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