Day 19 - SPP Cleanse

As you probably know by now, I love farmers markets.  I'm blessed to live in a town that has a robust market year round.  There is nothing better than tasty fresh pesticide-free produce!

Reasons to buy local (courtesy of Leda Meredith's "The Locavore's Handbook"):

• Save the world. A regional diet consumes 17 times less oil and gas than a typical diet of nonlocal food.
• Taste. Instead of food bred for shipping durability and long shelf life, local ingredients are raised for flavor and harvested at their peak.
• Health. The shorter the time from harvest to eating, the fewer nutrients are lost.  Food that has traveled thousands of miles na dsat on a store shelf for days has less nutritional value than its recently picked local counterpart.
• Biodiversity. 96% of commercial vegetable varieties have gone extint in the past 100 years. Small farms and home gardeners preserve genetic diversity by growing herloom varieties that aren't suitable for conventional agriculture.
• Food safety. 100% of food-borne illness scares of the past few decades came from industrial agriculture.
• Support the local economy.  Money spent on local foods is almost twice as likely to be reinvested within the local economy as money spent at a chain supermarket.
• Preserve fertile farmland and wildlife habitats. Small organic farms restore and revitalize their soils rather than deplete them as conventional farming does. They also protect the green spaces adjacent to the farmed fields, providing habitat for wildlife.
• Support your local farmers. Farmers who sell directly to customers through farmers' markets and CSAs cut out the middleman and get retail value for their food, which enables them to stay on their land.

11:30 - smoothie (banana, orange, strawberries, raspberries, spinach, carrot, flax seed & flax oil)
2:30 - leftover lentils with curried veggies
5:45 - same smoothie as AM