As local eating gains currency and eaters find that having strong connection to food they eat feels good and tastes good too, more and more people are going beyond buying locally to grow some of their food at home.
During World War II, the U.S. Government encouraged citizens to start their own Victory Gardens, growing their own food right at home, in order to take the pressure off wartime food supplies. Today many people are reclaiming the idea of Victory Gardens with new goals in mind—like knowing that the food on their dinner table was grown with the goals of environmentally sustainability and social justice. When you grow you own food, you don’t have to worry about your dinner taking a journey of thousands of miles from the place it was grown to your dinner table. Instead it can take a journey of just a few steps.
You don’t need a lot of land to grow food at home—even a small outdoor space can hold a planter box full of your favorite cooking greens, or heirloom tomato plants that can provide you with fresh tomatoes you’ll know were ripened on the vine! Basil grown in a window box can turn into summer’s best pesto—or even go into the freezer, so you can have some of that summer flavor when fresh basil is month’s gone. Urban “guerilla gardeners” are even taking advantage of those patches of earth between the sidewalk and the street. There’s also the Urban Homesteaders growing their own food in Los Angeles. It’s cheap and easy to get urban soil tested for contaminants, and possible to amend the soil or build raised beds where conditions are less than ideal. If there’s no space at home, try a local community garden, where you can gain access to a plot in a shared garden—and share knowledge with other community gardeners.
For whatever you can’t grow at home, the Buy Fresh Buy Local guide is here to help Californians. This guide is the roadmap to finding the farmers in California that can provide you with the freshest and healthiest seasonal produce, meat, and dairy. The guide carries a complete listing of Bay Area farmers’ markets where you can buy direct from growers, as well as retailers that stock locally grown foods and provide their customers with information on where it was grown.
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