Talk to your parents and classmates about the benefits of buying local:
- Use less oil: Produce is shipped an average of 1,500 miles from the time it's picked until it arrives on supermarket shelves. Cut back on oil consumption by buying local produce and taste the difference!
- Help the grower: Only 18 cents of every dollar goes to the grower when you buy from a supermarket, while the other 82 cents goes to various middlemen. Invest in your local growers and buy locally grown food whenever you can.
- Sustainable forests: Much of the hardwood furniture on the market is made from ancient forests in places like Canada, Tasmania, the Amazon and Central Africa. Help support local sustainable forestry practices by only buying local wood.
- Agriculture: Big industrial farms are a huge source of air and water pollution. Fertilizer and pesticide runoff into our streams and rivers causes severe environmental impacts while waste from industrial animal farms gets into our groundwater.
- Put your money where your home is: By spending your money at locally owned stores instead of big chains you help keep the money circulating in your own community. Also, by supporting local banks and credit unions you can be sure that your money isn’t being used to fund environmentally destructive projects around the world.
Ideas for Teachers:
- Try to brainstorm a list of locally owned businesses and another list of chain stores or non-locally owned businesses. Which kind are there more of? Where are they located? What are the price differences?
- Pick one type of item bought by most everyone in the class and create two comparative stories out if it; one life story of the item created and sold through industrial means and one life story of the item created and sold locally. For each, ask you students questions like: Where were the raw materials that made it mined or grown? Where was it made? Where was it packaged? Where was it sold? Where will the item and its packaging go when you are done with it? What are the environmental and social effects of each stage of this history? Create a time line or storybook with illustrations at each stage!
- Take a field trip to a local farmer’s market. Assign each student to track down one type of produce available at the market. Have them report back on how it is grown, where it comes from, and what differences exist between the item found at the farmer’s market and what they might get in a supermarket.