General kitchen advice
Buy Local Food : The most local food of all comes from your own garden. Plant a new garden, enlarge the one you already have, or extend your growing season by using row covers and cloches.
Buy Local Food : ...but at the same time, figure out what makes sense. It is more energy efficient to raise lambs in New Zealand and ship them to the UK than to raise them in the UK, because New Zealand lamb farming is more energy efficient. It is also more energy efficient to buy produce raised in Spain, than produce that has to be grown in greenhouses in the UK. Baby steps require figuring out which things make sense and which don't.
Buy Local Food : Cultivate an awareness of how far your food travels. When Rich Pirog, Food Systems Program Leader for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, tracked the miles traveled for 16 types of produce, he found that locally sourced fruits and vegetables such as apples, lettuce and tomatoes traveled an average of 56 miles, compared to 1,494 miles — nearly 27 times farther — for the same fruits and vegetables delivered through conventional retail channels. Things get stickier with combination foods, strawberry yogurt for example. Pirog came up with 2,216 miles by adding up the distance traveled for the yogurt’s milk, sugar and strawberries. That figure could be slashed by 90 percent if you buy plain yogurt and stir in some locally grown honey and fruit.