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Great Food · Eat Smart · Choose Local First
The foods you eat can impact your health and wellbeing and even help prevent chronic disease. Here you'll find lots of nutritious information to help you make the right food choices for you and your lifestyle!

Choose Local First

Printed June 30, 2006
Shopping for atlantic produced products at your Co-op is not only better for your local economy and community; it's better for your health.

"Anything that is locally grown means you are supporting local people and family farmers and the produce is getting to the market faster to retain its nutrients," according to award-winning science writer, Thomas Pawlick.

Declining nutrients in produce spawns dire warning The Canadian Press

Eating five to 10 servings of fruits and vegetables a day may not be enough if government nutrient tables can be believed.

"Almost everything in the produce fruit and vegetable section of the supermarket which we once assumed would be very healthy is anything but," claims Thomas Pawlick, author of The End of Food: How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Food Supply - And What We Can Do About It, published by Greystone Books in Vancouver.

"For us to get the same amount of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients that our grandparents or even our parents did," he says, "we would have to eat five times as much or more of some of those fruits and vegetables."

Pawlick, 64, an award-winning science writer from Kingston, Ont., says that much of his research data come from tables published by Agriculture Canada. "Every three or four years Agri Canada do a fresh set of tables on the current nutritional value of various foods. They send people out at random to various supermarkets and they buy foods off the shelf, take them back to the lab and do analysis of their nutrient content and these are published," he says, adding that consumers can go online and look at the food tables themselves. Pawlick says that a fresh tomato bought from the supermarket has 61 per cent less calcium than it did in the 1950s. "Virtually across the board, some losses have been as steep as 70 per cent. And it's because of the way the crops are grown and raised."

Pawlick lays the onus directly on the large corporate farms that supply most of the grocery chains in Canada. "They choose varieties of fruits and vegetables, and when they make that choice the question of nutrition or flavour never enters into the picture," he says.

"They select varieties of fruit for thickness so when it's in a truck going across the country it won't get smushed," he charges. "So they want hard rubbery fruit and vegetables for a longer shelf life." Pawlick says the same corporate farms also select produce for appearance.

"They have to have uniformity so that every tomato or strawberry looks like the other one, and they all have to be ripe on the same day so they can be machine harvested." Pawlick says that because imported produce is harvested prematurely, it is artificially ripened with ethylene gas. "This decreases the amount of sugar and flavour in the fruit as opposed to allowing it to ripen on the vine."

Pawlick says that where consumers can, they should buy local produce. "Usually if it is locally grown it won't be so bad because it isn't being shipped a long distance," he says. "And anything that is locally grown means you are supporting local people and family farmers and the produce is getting to the market faster to retain its nutrients. The less time there is between picking and eating, the more nutrients will still be in the product." ________________________________________

Quick facts Tips from author Thomas Pawlick on how to circumvent the increasing decline of nourishing food:
• Because most farmers markets sell food that is grown locally, shop at them instead of supermarkets.
• Join a group that contracts local farmers to deliver fresh food to either your home or a central distribution point.
• When buying fresh local produce during the five months or so that it is available, freeze or preserve it.
• Try to eat seasonally instead of relying on imported food that loses its nutrients in lengthy transit. Printed with permission of the Times & Transcript newspaper.


© 2013 Co-op Atlantic