In many countries, people like to eat a wide variety of food that can be grown in other areas. As a result, people eat more food produced in other regions than local food. Do the disadvantages of this trend outweigh its advantages?
Around the world, growing number of people is enjoying imported foods which were produced beyond local area. There are some disadvantages of this eating habit. However, advantages are clearly overwhelming the disadvantages.
Eating local foods means that people are contributing to local economy. In this regard, taking foods from other regions can damage local producers and market. For example, if people living in a seaside town start to eat beef imported from other region means that, local fish restaurant manager and fisherman might lose their job.
However, there are clear advantages we can find from this trend. First of all, people can have freedom of choice. Due to the development of transportation and economy, one can eat any kind of food that he or she wants. For instance, student in Korea can taste nice beef grown from Australia which was almost unable to reach 50 years ago. In this way, the freedom of eating will enrich the life of people around the world.
Adding to that, people in local area can also export their products to other regions. The risk generated from the invasion of imported foods means that they can change the risk to chance by using the same trade networks. To take an example, a seaside town impacted by imported beef can export their fisheries to the region that is famous for beef but cannot produce good marine products. In this way, they can make new chance while ensuring the benefit of imported foods.
To conclude, eating foods produced in other region can make temporary disadvantages to the local economy. However, this trend has strong advantages in terms of the quality of living by the ensured freedom of choice and new enterprise chances based on the trade networks developed from the import.