One of the major benefits to eating local foods is that they are extremely fresh and taste better. In order to confirm this, I conducted a little experiment with my family members as the research subjects. For dinner one night, I prepared two dishes of spaghetti with red sauce. The difference between the two was that one was made with store-bought pasta and Prego sauce (traditional style) while the other was made with fresh goods from the Exeter farmers’ market (pasta from Valicenti Pasta Farm, onions, and garlic). The tomatoes were bought at the grocery store because they are not currently in season.
After letting all my family members try each pasta, they unanimously voted for the version made with local ingredients. Here are some of the things they said about the farmers’ market spaghetti:
Mom: It has flavor. You can taste the ingredients. This one is rich and sweet while the other is thin and bitter.
Dad: It has more character while the other one has a thin packaged-food taste.
Brother: It tastes more real. Has more flavor. The other one is boring.
When I tasted the two different pastas, I also found that the one made with local goods was infinitely better than the one made from packaged goods. I found that the store-bought one did not have much flavor and was too acidic. Usually I can enjoy a basic spaghetti with red sauce, but when compared to the local version, there was no comparison. This is the benefit to cooking with local goods. The food tastes beyond fresh and has more complex flavors! While you can get “fresh” fruits and vegetables in the produce section of the grocery store, they still can have chemicals in and on them that are used to increase the shelf life. So in actuality, they are not as fresh as the goods from farmers’ markets.
This was a fun experiment to do because it was not only fun cooking using local goods, but it was also great to see how much better the local version tasted than the store-bought version! I encourage you to try this experiment at home and recreate a store-bought meal with fresh goods from a farmers’ market! If you do, comment below with what you made and how the dish turned out!
Till Next Time,
Chloe