“It’s bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children’s health than the pediatrician.” – Meryl Streep

Last week over at Queercents, I posted about how buying local foods can reduce our carbon footprint. This strategy is both good for the environment and easier on our pocketbook.

At LighterFootstep.com, Chris Baskind provides Ten First Steps to move toward a lighter, more sustainable lifestyle. One suggestion is to buy local and in season. He writes:

According to the non-profit group Sustainable Table, the typical carrot travels 1,838 miles before it ends up in your kitchen. That’s a lot of food miles, and a tremendous amount of wasted fossil fuels and packaging.

Buying regionally produced food is a keystone of sustainability: not only does it save the energy costs associated with shipping bulk produce, it keeps a portion of your grocery money close to where live. So locate your local farmer’s market and add it to your weekly errands. You’ll be supporting local growers while enjoying fresh, seasonal produce.

Recently, J.D. Roth at Get Rich Slowly did an analysis of the grocery store vs. the farmers’ market to determine which has the cheapest produce. He surveyed produce prices at five different locations: the farmers’ market, a produce stand, and three different grocery stores and came away with a clear winner. He writes:

During the peak of the harvest, at least, the produce stand offers the best balance of quality and cost, with the best price on 33 out of 63 items… Another advantage of shopping exclusively at a produce stand or farmers market is that there are fewer temptations that fall outside the realm of healthy eating. One vendor at the farmers market sells fresh bakery cookies, but that’s as bad as it gets. The produce stand carries bottled soda (including my beloved Mexican Coke), honey stix, wax-paper-wrapped cubes of caramel, and carob balls, but there are few other distractions. Grocery stores — even high-end natural food stores — are warrens of processed food.

Katherine Gray at Dirt to Dish concurs. In her post about Oregon’s in-season and red-from-the-vine-tomatoes, she writes:

And here’s a note about costs, since people are talking about the cost of local foods from the farmer’s market vs. buying from the grocery… These tomatoes were $1.79 per pound, the best deal I found at the market. My grocery store had local tomatoes advertised for $1.99 per pound. I saved $1.20 in total and the farmer got all my money, about $11.50, instead of a smaller percentage (stats I've seen estimate that growers get anywhere from 3.5 cents to 18 cents per retail dollar price when their food is sold through grocery stores, rather than directly to the consumer).

Katherine pointed me to two other blogs with interesting posts on this topic. Sam at Becks & Posh did her own analysis between Safeway and the Farmers’ Market. She writes:

Shopping for fresh produce at the farmers' market over the last two weekends saved me a full 29% on what I would have spent on the same or inferior items at Safeway. Incredible but true, especially since Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food Movement has recently been quoted as saying about the San Francisco Farmers' Market that "The prices were astronomical, twice or even three times as high as those of “conventional” products" when my unscientific little test here suggests the opposite could be true. Not only that, the farmers' market items in most cases are likely to be far superior to those at Safeway, will have travelled less distance to get to my plate and will sometimes be organic.

The Eat Local Challenge website is hosting a month-long Eat Local Challenge in September and Jen Maiser provides her penny-wise thoughts on eating local. She writes:

This whole discussion can’t occur without an acknowledgment that we should be spending a higher percentage of our budget on our food. By percentage of our income, Americans spend less on our food than most other countries. But I’m not one to tell people what to do – I’d rather live through example, and that's what my part in this effort is all about. I, personally, have chosen to spend more money and more time on my food. And I pay for it in other ways. I don’t own a car, I don’t spend much on clothing, and I generally scrimp and save where I can. But that’s such an individual and personal decision.

What I do know is this: Many people try and write off eating anything locally with the excuse that it’s too expensive. Say that you don’t want to do it, or that you don’t believe in it, or you don’t have the energy to dedicate to it, or anything else. But when it comes down to buying fresh, local, in-season fruits and vegetables, the problem will not be price. You will find at least some fruits and vegetables that are less expensive than, or on par with, your supermarket.

Katherine Gray encourages people to get started with baby steps:

Eating local does not have to be an all-or-nothing endeavor. Local-eating proponents say that even just spending $10 a week on local choices makes a big impact.

A big impact on the environment and as noted above, on your pocketbook too! So where do you source the cheapest produce in your town? And please elaborate if region plays into the equation?

-------------
Nina blogs about money at Queercents.