Sustainable Living by Shawn Dell Joyce

Eating local embodies the spirit of the first Thanksgiving, when Puritans and Wampanoags sat down together to share a meal, which consisted mainly of shellfish, eels, wild fowl (including swans and eagles) and other local foods that they could gather or grow.

When we source our foods locally, we eat in season and celebrate what's available locally.

Absent from the first Thanksgiving feast were modern traditional dishes, such as corn on the cob (all corn was dried by that time), pumpkin pie (they had no sugar), cranberry sauce (no sweetener other than maple syrup) and stuffing (they served pudding).

We have altered the menu over the years to the point that we rehash and serve the exact same dishes over and over. This year, have a real Thanksgiving by celebrating the local harvest and the hardworking hands that grew it. Buy your dinner ingredients from local farms, and prepare what is seasonally available in our area. Your food dollars will stay local, nourishing farm families, farmhands and your community. This is an act of gratitude that bolsters your local economy during tight times.

Right now, you can find turkeys that live the way nature intended, chasing bugs, scratching in the grass and frolicking in the fall leaves instead of penned up one on top of another in factory farms. These turkeys will cost a little more than their supermarket counterparts because they are not mass-produced or government-subsidized. They also taste more "turkeyish" because they are not force-fed unnatural diets. As a result, free-range birds are healthier and better for you, as well.

When you pay a little more for local produce, it is because you are paying the full cost to grow the food at a fair rate. Large farms that wholesale to chain grocers are subsidized by our tax dollars, lowering the costs of goods on supermarket shelves. This makes nonlocal food items appear cheaper than locally grown foods, but there are hidden costs that must be paid in the long run by someone else -- such as the loss of soil fertility, social costs of cheap labor, and environmental devastation of shipping food long distances.

We Americans are used to cheap and plentiful food; we spend less on food than any other developed nation in the world. On average, Americans spend only 2 percent of their disposable incomes on meat and poultry, compared with 4.1 percent in 1970. This quest for cheap and plentiful has seen the average size of a farm bloat while the number of farms and farmers has decreased. In the 1960s, one farmer supplied food for 25.8 people in the U.S. and abroad. Today that same farmer feeds 144 people.

This policy has led to a decline in farming; farming even was removed as an occupation from the census. Our hope for food security lies with the next generation of small-scale agriculture. Younger farmers are opting for organic and smaller farms that retail directly to the public through farmers markets and specialty shops. Eighteen percent of organic farmers are younger than 35, compared with 5.8 percent in conventional agriculture.

For farming to be an economically viable profession, we must make it more profitable for the farmers by eliminating the middleman. Right now, farmers get about 8 cents of every dollar we spend on food in chain groceries. When you buy directly from the farm, the farmer gets the whole dollar, and that dollar has the economic impact of $2 in the farmer's community.

To find local Thanksgiving dinner ingredients, go to http://www.LocalHarvest.org, http://www.EatLocalChallenge.com and http://100MileDiet.org.

Shawn Dell Joyce is an award-winning columnist and founder of the Wallkill River School in Orange County, N.Y. You can contact her at Shawn@ShawnDellJoyce.com. To find out more about Shawn Dell Joyce and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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