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Eat Locally Print E-mail
Written by Angelle Batten, HHC, MEd   
We have a family ritual of giving thanks before each meal. Sometimes it’s rather routine, and other times it feels more alive. During those times, we often talk about the food we’re about to eat (or maybe have all ready started to eat before everyone else if you’re one of my six-year old sons). We talk about how nature has such a variety of colors – how could there be so many shades of green? Or, about how a particular food was grown – on a vine, in the ground, on a tree? Maybe how an animal was raised – did it get a chance to wander around the farm and eat the kind of food that would have made it healthy and happy, or did it suffer on a farm without seeing the light of day and get force fed grains instead of grass? 

These feel like some of the most important conversations we have. I want my children to make the connection between their food and their health and the health of the planet. I want them to be grateful for their food. I want them to begin to feel a responsibility to themselves and to our Earth when making choices about what to eat.

“The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.” ~ Michael Pollan

A few years ago, I was teaching a group of elementary school children about where different foods come from. When I asked where hamburger comes from, a little boy shouted, “McDonald's!” And he was serious. When I pushed him to think about where McDonald's gets the meat to make the hamburgers, he wasn’t sure. I’ve since realized that lots of children are not aware of where food comes from and it gets even more complicated when so much of the food kids are eating is actually Fake Food – from a science lab or a factory farm.

If your work does not focus on food and health like mine does, maybe you are not thinking about where your food is coming from or talking about it with your child. After all there are a zillion things we are trying to teach our kids and we each prioritize them differently. But what I know is this:
 
1. You want your child to be healthy.
2. What your child eats either contributes to health or disease.

So, in that light, maybe you’ll be inspired to think a little more about where your food is coming from and also to ‘eat a little closer to home’. Eating locally grown food is one of the best things we can do to improve our children’s health, as well as the health of our planet. You can also read about all the benefits our REAL mom, Kim Weaver, gets from having joined a local Community Supported Agriculture program and how easy it was to get started.
 
Eating locally – from your own garden, a farmers’ market, a CSA, or a roadside farmer’s stand – gives you so many opportunities to have conversations with your children about where our food comes from, how it affects our health and about how farming practices impact the health of our planet. The more conversations we can have with our kids, about anything, the healthier and happier they will be. Talk, eat, and enjoy each other’s company.

Angelle Batten, MEd. is a Holistic Health & Parenting Coach and co-founder of nourishMD. She teaches parents how to feed their children REAL food and parent in a more connected way every day - so despite a crazy busy life they can raise healthier, happier children who make the world a better place.