Human beings have the ability to make good food choices that will not only keep them healthy, but also not hurt our environment, and this would benefit everyone, including the poor. .
Having access to locally grown, fresh food and also preparing it is especially tough and expensive for those in the inner city. "Does a single mother of four living at the poverty line really have nothing better to do with her time than take a leisurely stroll down to the farmers' market to buy fresh ingredients that require peeling, chopping, and boiling? ", asks Henry Miller and Jayson Lusk In Defining Ideas, an online journal. They see the locavore movement as elitist, but recently better food choices at better prices have been provided for the poor and working class. For people who do not get to see crops growing on farms because they do not live in rural areas or in the suburbs, the supermarket may be the place they think food begins and ends. Of course, leafy greens and other produce needs to be grown somewhere, but there may not be any available in the local area. As a result, many children and even some adults have no clue how far their food has traveled or how much processing it has been through. Alex Hallat writes a comic strip called Arctic Circle, in which he demonstrates just how little his characters, representing the American consumer, understand about locavorism. They believe that their food traveled only as far as they did to purchase it at the local supermarket! In this way, Hallat is showing our lack of understanding, but this is not truly so funny. Due to a lack of knowledge and failure to make good food choices, the obesity rate in the United States is frightfully high. Our planet is also in bad health. Kathy Freston explains that "The consumption of fossil fuels by more then 80% and cutting carbon emissions by 3,000 pounds annually would occur if every American switched to a vegan diet.