Local Food Movement Quotes

Everywhere I go, I always look for creative entrepreneurs, whether it's artisans and craftsmen, small farmers and gardeners, or restaurateurs who use fresh, locally sourced ingredients.

If we want our bodies to be healthier, we need to get off the salmonella, e-coli, mad cow, assembly-line toxic hell train! God I love that statement. What did I just say?

Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.

You need to eat what's local. So that's what I'm trying to do - just be as close to nature as possible.

The farmers markets were another step to giving people an opportunity to take more power over their own lives-and also to provide another outlet for organic produce. That is important because the production and distribution of food is increasingly being monopolized and controlled by large corporate structures, large financial structures.

Our [generation] people have the worst diet of anybody. I'm ready to put a farmer on my payroll. We've got to get back to growing our own food. You are what you eat!

Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

I think the local food movement has been taken to idiotic extremes. And so I wrote about that and people got pissed.

We are fat and sick and dying because we have handed a basic, fundamental and intimate function of life over to corporations. We choose to value our nourishment so little that we entrust it to strangers. This is insanity. Feed yourselves. Feed your loved ones. And for God's sake feed your children.

All consumption should be local. No food products need to be transported over hundreds of miles to market. All commercial fishing should be abolished. If local communities need to fish the fish should be caught individually by hand. We need to stop flying, stop driving cars, and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles.

If, on the other hand, conservationists are willing to insist on having the best food, produced in the best way, as close to their homes as possible, and if they are willing to learn to judge the quality of food and food production, then they are going to give economic support to an entirely different kind of land use in an entirely different landscape. This landscape will have a higher ratio of caretakers to acres, of care to use. It will be at once more domestic and more wild than the industrial landscape.

We don't sing about eating local produce or growing beards or anything like that. It's funny to find yourself in a position where people associate you with things that are completely arbitrary to your songs.

That many if not most people...who want fresh leafy greens in January buy them at the supermarket after they've been bleached and plastic-bag shipped from California or beyond is not a tribute to modern technology; it's an unprecedented abdication of personal responsibility and a ubiquitous benchmark of abnormality.

There's a food revolution going on throughout the country. And it doesn't matter if you're down south, up north in Maine, if you're out west in Portland or Seattle.

We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free. (pg. 323, The Pleasures of Eating)

Memphis is a vibrant and diverse city that is on the verge of a Real Food renaissance. We are more than thrilled to be part of that movement by investing in the Crosstown and Shelby Farms Park developments.

The time has come to reclaim the stolen harvest and celebrate the growing and giving of good food as the highest gift and the most revolutionary act.

The best thing for you to do is shop at your local farmer's market and support the organic growers who are there. Because those are the guys who are taking care of the soil that is ultimately going to take care of us.

We must occupy the food system to create food democracy.

I'm a California girl, right? I grew up with that farm-to-table dining before it was sweeping the nation.

I imagine a certain amount of consumer impulse will be replaced by community connection. You can already see it starting with things like the local food movement.

In the rush to industrialize farming, we've lost the understanding, implicit since the beginning of agriculture, that food is a process, a web of relationships, not an individual ingredient or commodity.

I'm very hopeful that we'll see some change in our food system. I don't know how far we'll go, or how quickly we'll get there, but there is no question that a significant percentage of the American public is dissatisfied with the food system.

If you eat food or produce, you should take into account where that food comes from.

If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That's not gallons, but barrels. Small changes in buying habits can make big differences. Becoming a less energy-dependent nation may just need to start with a good breakfast.