With recent world events, it has become startlingly clear how important being self sufficient as a country can be. Don’t get us wrong, we love to trade with the world, we all love oranges, olives, wine, tea, coffee, chocolate etc. Keeping our fridges full with a healthy variety of fresh fruits and vegetables year round means importing from our organic farming connections around the world (by the way, we never use airfreight). Trading with the world is a positive thing, being friendly with our neighbours and part of unions benefits us all – nutritionally and to promote peace and prosperity. But, it’s also important to us to support local and buy local food as much as possible. Food security is a real issue and supporting local farmers and paying them fair prices (we’re looking at you supermarkets!) is always going to be an important topic that we will talk about regularly. So this week, with St Patrick’s Day on the calendar, we are celebrating all things local and Irish.
Good for You
Local food is fresh, more flavoursome and even more nutritious than food that has travelled! When there has been less time between harvest and your home, there are more nutrients. Did you know that as soon as a fruit or vegetable is picked it starts to loose nutrients? So the quicker it gets to your plate, the better. Locally grown food intended for local consumers will be picked when it is ripe too, so you’ll be getting the best flavour as well as avoiding waxes and preservatives found on food that has travelled a long way.
Good for the Planet
Buying locally produced food, of course means less food miles. ‘Food miles’ is the term for the distance food is transported from the time of its making until it reaches the consumer. Choosing local food requires less transport, therefore less fuel/energy is used to get the food to your plate – so local food has a smaller carbon footprint because it produces less transport related emissions. Less transport usually means less need for packaging too. We use as little packaging as possible to get our food to you, and where we do use packaging we choose paper or compostable bags over plastic.
Good for your Community
Supporting local food producers means more work and more money in your community. Spending money with Irish business will mean more Irish jobs, more Irish tax and therefore better services for everyone. Shopping locally strengthens the local economy too. Local businesses are more likely to recirculate the money locally – not just on wages and taxes, but also on local suppliers and services. This leads to a stronger financial foundation for our neighbours and communities and a more recession-resilient local economy.
Will you support the local economy and help Ireland build better food security by buying a box of organic fruit, vegetables and groceries from us today? We deliver nationwide. Have a look at all we can deliver to your door here.