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Long Island Edition
How Eating Locally Can Fight Global Warming by Sharon Kennelty-Cohen
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ocavore was the Word of the Year in 2007 as announced by the New Oxford American Dictionary. It means people that eat food that has been processed within a minimized transportation range. Transportation is one of the major villains in the causation of climate change. According to NASA, climate change is a shift in the average weather in a place scaled over many years. Earth’s climate is not a constant; it is always changing. Unfortunately, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 1850s, the temperature of the planet has been increasing, and the rate of this warming has taken a sharp turn since the mid-1900s. When faced with such cataclysmic disaster, many people feel powerless as to how they can help. The United Nations came up with a series of sustainability goals that can be adopted by anyone to help the planet. On a personal scale, I suggest we all try to be locavores. If you have bitten into a fresh peach in season and had the sweet juices slip down your chin, you have an
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experiential understanding of the wonders of fresh fruit. Anyone that has plucked an ear of corn from the stalk in the field knows the spark of a natural sugar in your mouth. Seasonal foods are delicious. By eating what’s in season, humans follow the eons-long tradition our ancestors would recognize. People learned to save and store food in order to survive times when it was hard to find fresh sources. In hot lands, it became important to dry foods. Then, in order to resuscitate their nourishment, water and other liquids were added to the fare to make it palatable. In cold lands, ice could be used to pack food for storage. By heating the frozen foods, they were restored to a nourishing state. Native Americans would make “journey cakes” when they were traveling a distance. Language misunderstandings converted them to “Johnny cakes,” as food for the road. With advances in travel, people wanted to bring food with them and incorporated the latest in technology