Why Buy Local Food?

There are plenty of good reasons to buy local food, from environmental benefits to economic support for local producers. Most importantly of all, perhaps, is the opportunity to reconnect with your local community and find out more about the people who work, farm and live in your region.

Keeping food miles down

Buying local food is the best way to prevent food travelling long distances through complex transport networks. Buying food through a local food hub, like We Love Local, is even better, because we gather local produce centrally, before distributing it in just one little bio-diesel van to all of you.

Supermarkets have centralised distribution systems, which means that some produce is transported to the other end of the country just to be packed before being brought back to shops in its place of origin. Even worse, some processed food, such as shellfish, is sent to Asia to be hand-shelled before being brought back to the UK again.

Some people argue that local food can take more energy to produce than food manufactured abroad due to our climate and the need to heat & irrigate certain crops or feed certain livestock, but these instances are very few, and as a general rule, most food produced & sold locally will have a much lower carbon footprint than its foreign equivalent.

Food quality

Local food often makes it from field to fork in less than 48 hours, mean that nutrient levels, which decline rapidly after harvest, tend to be higher.

Even better, local food products tend to be grown or produced by hand, with care and attention, preserving traditional breeds or recipes and resulting in food of the highest quality.

Trading fairly with farmers & producers

Buying from a local food hub, such as We Love Local, or supporting a local farm shop or farmers’ market means that farmers and producers get a fair price for the food they are producing.

Not only do farmers & growers battle to compete with cheaper imported food which comes from countries where production costs and standards are lower, they are also forced to lower prices even further by the aggressive purchasing & marketing tactics of the big supermarkets.

Most price cuts or ‘deals’ which you see in your local supermarket aisle are passed straight back to the farmer who bears the cost of the promotion or loses the business.

Investing in your local economy

Supporting small producers, farmers & shops is vital to the survival of our local & rural communities. Spending £10 on local food will result in £7 of that money being re-invested in the local area.

It’s fun!

Buying, eating and learning about local food, and the people who make it, is fun.

We hope you will enjoy discovering new products and new producers as we add them to our list.

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