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Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security Groups Nationwide Announce the 2006 'Eat Local Thanksgiving Challenge' October 11, 2006 A coalition of national groups that encourage sustainable agriculture and local eating will challenge folks to eat within a 100-mile radius of their homes this Thanksgiving season. 100MileDiet.org, the Locavores, EatLocalChallenge.com, Local Harvest, BALLE, Straus Communications, and others have joined together to encourage people to explore the revolutionary benefits of eating locally. Thanksgiving Day, the traditional celebration of food, family, and community, is the perfect opportunity to explore the benefits of local eating. A Thanksgiving meal prepared with local ingredients will not only be fresher and healthier, it will also support the small farmer who pays her workers a living wage, grows a diversity of crops, refuses to use pesticides or genetically modified organisms, kills her animals in a humane fashion, sells her products only within local markets (ensuring that the money stays within the community), and whose children more than likely go to school with your own. These simple pleasures are exactly what we have lost in the age of quick-fix microwave-meal industrial-scale agriculture. At a time when our food travels an average of 1,500 miles to reach our plates (despite rising gas prices) and even then may be contaminated, many Americans feel disillusioned and disconnected with their food. Rising rates of diabetes and heart disease have been linked to trans-fats and processed foods, cases of mad cow disease have been linked to unclean conditions in large feed lots, and much of the Midwest is a vast sea of corn and sorghum grown by a few large agricultural corporations who have nearly extinguished the small family farm. Meanwhile, genetically modified foods are showing up unlabeled in our grocery stores despite overwhelming public concern about health risks, the diversity of crop species grown for food has fallen from 7,000 worldwide to only 120, agricultural workers sprayed by pesticides in the field fall ill from cancer, and the runoff of chemical fertilizers is poisoning our water supply. The list goes on. What does a local-eating Thanksgiving look like? Many people across the country will still prefer to eat turkey from local breeders, while others will try a seasonal local specialty like crab, salmon, grass-fed beef, or even wild game. Shopping for food can be a revolutionary act. Choosing to spend your money at the local Farmers' Market, or with a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, is a choice not only for better taste, but also for your health, the local environment, and the local economy. Thanksgiving is about giving thanks - this year, let's find something to really be thankful about! Through 100MileDiet.org, Locavores, and EatLocalChallenge.com, thousands of North Americans will put local food on the table this Thanksgiving. Locavores is an ever-growing group of people who have pledged to eat within a 100-mile radius of their homes for one month every year (www.locavores.com), and many blog about their experiences on www.eatlocalchallenge.com. Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon of www.100milediet.org ate a wholly local diet for one year and inspired people worldwide to try their own local-eating experiments. The local eating movement has been covered by the New York Times, USA Today, Time Magazine, Utne Reader, CNN, BBC, Australian ABC and many local news sources. Local Harvest (www.localharvest.org) is an online resource for people searching for local sources of food, including farms, farmers' markets and CSAs. BALLE (Better Alliance for Local Living Economies - www.livingeconomies.org) is an international alliance of 35 independent local business networks with more than 11,000 members dedicated to building long-term economic empowerment and prosperity through local business ownership, economic justice, cultural diversity, and environmental stewardship. All of these resources offer a great deal of useful information for anyone interested in learning how to eat locally.

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