It is interesting to note that Farmer’s market concept as well as food movement. Sustainability refers to food system practices that respect the ability of future generations to meet their food requirements. This includes environmental protection, profitability, ethical treatment of food system workers and other living beings, and community development. Local food systems meet these criterion to a much greater extent than industrial food systems, due in part to having to deal with direct consequences of food system decisions.
Farmers’ markets, through their potential to sustain and support the local food system, can contribute to sustainability goals. This does not mean that local food systems are inherently more sustainable than industrial food systems, but that they are more apt to acknowledge the importance of relying on locally available resources and recognizing interdependencies between local producers and consumers. This can then lead to more sustainable practices.
Farmers’ markets encourage local food security through their promotion and support of local food production. Local food production and distribution can assist in fostering food security for the local region.
Through reducing the distance that food is transported, farmers’ markets decrease “food miles”. The distance food takes to travel is directly related to the amount of fossil fuels required to get it there. Since fossil fuels cause pollution and directly impact climate change, reducing the distance that food travels translates into environmental (and related socio-economic) benefits.
Farmers’ markets can encourage human wellbeing through various means. One way they can accomplish this is through educating consumers about health. The type of food that is offered at farmers’ markets can also sustain human health. For instance, farmers’ markets often feature organic foods. Organic produce has been found to contain higher levels of antioxidants, substances attributed to cancer prevention in humans, than non-organic foods (Benbrook, 2005). Locally-produced and sold foods also have health benefits.
There are a number of common characteristics of farmers’ markets. These include:
- high levels of repeat patronage by consumers, patronage by those who live in or near communities with established farmers’ markets;
- overwhelming participation by small-scale farmers who report that sales at farmers’ markets consist a significant share of agricultural income;
- prices close to or slightly above those found in nearby supermarkets;
- substantial spillovers to local businesses from patrons of farmers’ markets; and,
- The overwhelming importance noted by patrons on direct social interaction with producers.
On both a community and individual scale, farmers’ markets can assist in sustaining human health and wellbeing. This occurs though various means including health-related education that can occur during producer-consumer interactions, healthy products offered at the market, and the ability of the market to have a ‘healthy-community’ approach in its operations.
TBL GAME EXPERIENCE- FOOD
In the TBL game experience, we found that it wasn’t as hard of a challenge to keep up with the populations demand. At first, we would construct a farm then eventually earn many profits to build an organic farm. Most times we would construct a GM operated farm, mainly due to the funds we have. The difficult part was to produce funds to allow the progress of the game to continue. These GM farms create an abundant supply of food for the population and larger funds than that of the regular/organic farm. However while trying to equalize the other resources at hand, purchasing a ranch was a difficult task. If a ranch could be purchased in our game, it would be a bonus that creates vast amounts of food and profits. It is hard to ignore the GM farm in this game since it is the one that supplies the most.The role of foods in the game and in real life correlate on how much resources are consumed and can be maintained; GMO offers the population another source of alternative to maintaining the food ratio to population consumption. The amount of food wasted in certain parts of the world are quite devastating to hear about of how much is thrown away or not used in the most efficient manner; this has a negative impact on our society as the food that is not used efficiently can be used to help other countries that are not as well of as us. Food also plays a vital part of our health as we can noticed that eating the right amount and having healthy choices provided to us will lower our visits to the doctor and maintain a lifestyle free from complications of health risk.
http://crcresearch.org/case-studies/crc-case-studies/farmers-markets-and-local-food-systems
food and sustainability 