I can’t help but proselytize a bit about healthy eating when I’m at work. I’m sure my coworkers, many of whom eat fast food every day, are sick of hearing me talk about it.
But get this…yesterday a coworker sent me an email telling me how she went shopping over the weekend for the first time in a long while. She bought stuff to make sandwiches for her lunch and some steam-in-a-bag veggies. She said I had influenced her to do it! Baby steps…I was so happy to hear that.

Personally, now I try to make better/healthier choices when I shop. Even places like Costco are now offering more and more organic choices. I just bought two organically raised whole chickens there over the weekend. Yes, they were 2.5 times the cost of the Foster Farms chickens, but I’m hopeful they were healthier (both for me and for the chickens).
I’m also growing my own vegetables in my back yard and hoping I will be able to freeze/preserve quite a bit for the winter this year.

Generally, the small steps that our family attempts are simply: community gardening and family discussions surrounding food choices. More specifically, I try to bring my family to events and activities that remind us of the importance of our food:

http://www.nofasummerconference.org/#

and

http://jerseychildren.wordpress.com/category/events/

Looking forward to FoodCorps!

After we watched Food, Inc. we just started getting our meat from a local farm, where we actually can meet the farmer and see the animals running and grazing and maintaining their health from fresh grass, rather than antibiotics. We shop as much as possible at farmers markets, and as much as possible focus on shopping local and seasonally.

I joined a produce co-op in January 2010. So far, that has been my main effort in improving the food in our lives. We have a bushel of fresh fruits and vegetables to eat every week. These foods are bought at the farmer’s market 50 miles south of where we live. The farmer’s market gets its food mainly from local farmers and farmer’s in the surrounding 5 states.

Since joining the co-op, I have watched the movie Supersize Me. That has almost completely ended our eating fast food. We will be a fast food free family entirely before the end of the summer. I am adding the movie you mention and the books you mention to my “to be read/watched” list.

Thank so much for this article. I am going to backtrack and read some related things you have written.

I don’t mean to be a crank here, but: while It’s a visually gorgeous salad, to be fair, Alaskan salmon isn’t very “local” to New Jersey. Yes, a lot of the wild salmon harvested in Alaska is *relatively* sustainably harvested, as compared to factory fishing. But nearly every season, restrictions are necessary as people do over-fish it; sometimes the harvest seasons close early, and occasionally don’t even open. There is consistent conflict between commercial harvesting, primarily for sale to the lower 48, and subsistence harvest by Alaska Natives.

The carbon footprint of getting fresh salmon from, say, the Copper River to Hoboken is pretty huge. It’s only marginally better to get it from Ship Creek (Anchorage) to Hoboken.

I agree pretty much entirely with the rest of the post, where you use the word “local” three times. I’m just not sure that the Alaskan salmon is the best way of illustrating the point. (And yes, I appreciate that I’m probably coming off as one of those real food movement people who take themselves too seriously. So I won’t ask about the origin of the olives.)