Read this passage and answer the questions that follow: Eating Local Foods If you spend every Saturday at your local farmers' market, picking over the beans and radishes, you are participating in a popular pastime that has enormous benefits for your community and your health. A study from Michigan State University suggests a variety of reasons to buy your food locally. Support for your local economy and environment makes buying locally an obvious plus. Why wouldn't you want your hard-earned dollars to go to farmers and growers from your own community? Why wouldn't you want to help... Show more Read this passage and answer the questions that follow: Eating Local Foods If you spend every Saturday at your local farmers' market, picking over the beans and radishes, you are participating in a popular pastime that has enormous benefits for your community and your health. A study from Michigan State University suggests a variety of reasons to buy your food locally. Support for your local economy and environment makes buying locally an obvious plus. Why wouldn't you want your hard-earned dollars to go to farmers and growers from your own community? Why wouldn't you want to help those farmers to retain their land, which provides your home town or region with open space and acres of greenery? You have probably had the experience of buying tomatoes in winter and finding that they are tasteless and hard. When we eat locally, we eat foods in their season, meaning that we eat them at the peak of flavor and ripeness. Shipping fruits or vegetables from somewhere in South America means that they are picked before they are ripe and may lose most of their nutrients by the time they reach your local grocery. In winter, a large percentage of the produce you see in the grocery comes from locations hundreds of miles away. The Michigan State study also points out the hazards involved in eating food from far away. If vegetables or meat travel from place to place before arriving at your grocery store, they have multiple opportunities to become contaminated. A sign on blueberries showing that they are grown at Fairhaven Farm allows you to do a bit of research on that farm to discover how they grow their blueberries. Do they spray them with pesticides? Do they pick fresh berries daily? When you buy at the farmers' market, you often have the opportunity to ask the farmer directly about the food you are about to consume. Show less
Read this passage and answer the questions that follow:
Eating Local Foods If you spend every Saturday at your local farmers' market, picking over the beans and radishes, you are participating in a popular pastime that has enormous benefits for your community and your health. A study from Michigan State University suggests a variety of reasons to buy your food locally. Support for your local economy and environment makes buying locally an obvious plus. Why wouldn't you want your hard-earned dollars to go to farmers and growers from your own community? Why wouldn't you want to help those farmers to retain their land, which provides your home town or region with open space and acres of greenery? You have probably had the experience of buying tomatoes in winter and finding that they are tasteless and hard. When we eat locally, we eat foods in their season, meaning that we eat them at the peak of flavor and ripeness. Shipping fruits or vegetables from somewhere in South America means that they are picked before they are ripe and may lose most of their nutrients by the time they reach your local grocery. In winter, a large percentage of the produce you see in the grocery comes from locations hundreds of miles away. The Michigan State study also points out the hazards involved in eating food from far away. If vegetables or meat travel from place to place before arriving at your grocery store, they have multiple opportunities to become contaminated. A sign on blueberries showing that they are grown at Fairhaven Farm allows you to do a bit of research on that farm to discover how they grow their blueberries. Do they spray them with pesticides? Do they pick fresh berries daily? When you buy at the farmers' market, you often have the opportunity to ask the farmer directly about the food you are about to consume.
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