How much does eating locally-produced food help the climate problem? What are the other potential environmental and social benefits of eating locally-grown/produced food? Do you have a food garden in your school or at home? If not, do you want one?
Home Grown >
School Gardens
If more places begin to grow food locally, more people will have opportunities to purchase the crops. Locally grown food can help to decrease someone's carbon footprint because when purchasing food the process itself releases harmful carbon emissions.The use of transportation, packaging, and especially fertilizers have a large impact on someone's carbon footprint, but when purchasing locally grown food, all those elements decrease. Different foods and the different ways of processing them, lead to different amounts of carbon emissions. For example peas do not emit that same amount of carbon as something like beef. An important factor of lowering carbon emissions would be some slight changes in diet. When food is grown more locally there is more access to fresh food which releases less carbon.
Starting your own garden at home would be extremely beneficial, but it can also be very complicated and for many difficult to maintain. Whether it be through not having the time or the resources, home gardens can be a challenging task. I propose an increased use of school gardens. They are not unheard of, and have been used in many areas, but that doesn't deny the fact that more of them can be beneficial. The use of school gardens still helps to lower carbon emissions, but for many would be an easier process. Instead of creating difficulties for families at home, school gardens would be able to be maintained by multiple people, and would benefit those in and around the school district. Not only could a school garden provide more resources that schools could use for healthy lunches, it would open up the schools to giving their students experience in agriculture. It opens up students to a different learning environment where they can work hands-on. Academic, social, and thinking skills would all be worked upon. Research has shown that students benefit from school gardens. Studies have shown that students become more attentive and engaged, but also have received higher scores in science based curriculum. School gardens not only are beneficial to the environment by reducing carbon emissions, but they can also improve the school environment. This is why I think school gardens should be a more widely utilized concept.