By now, you’ve probably heard the schtick about local food dozens of times: it’s good for you! It’s good for local farmers! It’s healthier, safer, and better for the earth! I believe each and every one of those things, but they don’t include one important reason that I try to choose local foods: magic.
For me, being a witch is largely about relationship. Understanding that everything is alive and connected in ecstatically beautiful and complex ways is at the core of my spirituality. Engaging consciously, deliberately, and joyfully with those connections and relationships is my most fundamental act of magic.
When I choose to eat food grown in the ground near here, watered with the same water I drink, cooled by the same breezes I feel on my skin, I deepen my relationship with the spirits of this land. I allow the land, in a physical way, to enter into my body, to fuel my endeavors, and to literally become part of me. I also give my energy – in the form of my money – over to a farmer near me, who surely is cultivating in her own way an intimate relationship with the dirt and plants and bugs of her land.
When I eat local food, I don’t need charts to tell me what’s in season. I anticipate the first asparagus in the spring, the sweetness of June’s strawberries, the crunch of the first green beans, and then the amazing pop of sun warmed tomatoes. I’m attuned to how much it rains, and whether it’s unseasonably cool out. I think about the state of the soil and what might be running off into it.
So yes, it is good for you and for local businesses and for the earth. But eating local food is also a way of weaving yourself ever more tightly into the detailed, physical life of the place where you live, and honoring the sacredness of the many ways in which that particular piece of earth holds you.
[Also see Sarah’s ‘A Season To Taste’ blog.]