Читать книгу A Spoonful of Sugar - Liz Fraser - Страница 42

Local shops sell a wide range of great products at affordable prices and shopping there can save you money. Once you’ve added in travel, parking costs, fees to transport larger items home and your time, the overall cost can be higher in out-of-town supermarkets.

Buying local means buying food at its prime. It hasn’t sat around on shelves or on lorries for days losing nutrients and taste, so it’s as good as you can get it.

Food from local farms has usually undergone minimal processing, so it’s healthier and looks, smells and tastes real.

Shopping locally also retains our communities and distinctiveness, creating vibrant town centres where people can socialise as well as shop, and is vital for the local economy.

“Local food economies are of the utmost importance to the sustainability of rural communities. They bring great benefits to the countryside both in terms of safeguarding rural jobs, sustaining local retailers, providing outlets for local produce and conserving the British countryside. If we are to ensure the survival of our rural communities and regional food heritage, we must build positive relationships between our local food networks and the global food chain. This would be hugely beneficial for farming, for rural businesses, local jobs and for the conservation of the countryside as a whole.”

Jimmy Doherty, TV’s Jimmy’s Farm

The recent and welcome growing trend to try and purchase fresh produce locally is not just down to our desperate fat-busting requirements, but for three other main reasons:

Carbon footprint. The way we buy much of our food today (flying raspberries halfway across the world when we could just wait and have British raspberries in August when they’re good and ready) is mind-blowingly stupid, selfish and environmentally damaging. I’ve done it and you probably have too, but it’s now really time we stopped, or at least cut down drastically. The trend for all things Green means many of us are trying not to buy anything that has travelled more than a few miles, and this is nothing but a damned good move!

The best things come to those who wait. Many consumers have finally realised that what they thought they wanted (everything being available all the time) is actually very crap and unfulfilling for one simple reason: nothing has any sense of ‘specialness’ or excitement any more, and there is consequently now a yearning to get back to a time when you had to wait for something, and then enjoy it all the more. When winter meant apples and oranges, summer meant strawberries and asparagus, lamb came in the spring, berries in the autumn and all the seasons were different and special.

Fashion. Love it or hate it, what’s fashionable does dictate how many of us live, and shopping locally is the thing to be doing these days, once again. This is one trend we should ALL be following if we are to start feeding our kids something real for a change.