This one is pretty simple! Food produced within the community means that money gets put back into the local community to support more localized financial security. When you choose to spend money on locally grown food, it keeps your money in your community. Instead of supporting large supermarket chains, you can support individuals in your own community and help them prosper. Furthermore, local food producers can supply their meat and produce to other local businesses, such as restaurants, schools and hospitals. Many people today choose to eat at particular restaurants because they use local food. In turn, restaurants become more successful and further grow the local farming economy.
By challenging what can be called “Power centralization in food value chains” that cause unequal sharing of benefits throughout the food chain that tend to be enormous in scale – promoting independently owned food chain elements (processors, distributors) in order to reduce reliance on “power chains” ensures that local food chains can internalize external costs. This means that more money comes back into the local community. There is a lot more to this – but this is a start!
By supporting Eat Local Grey Bruce, you are supporting 40+ local producers, farmers, and makers livelihoods, and helping maintain the local economy! We have producers all over the region, and it is because of Eaters like you that they can continue to do what they do.