The Northern Environmental Action Team wants you to start thinking locally when it comes to eating.

To help residents understand the concept, the group held a screening of the movie “Fresh” last night, which NEAT program coordinator Beth Thompson said showed why it’s important to eat local food and not fly things like strawberries in from far off destinations, such as Chile.

“Even in Vancouver or a central city, your food is travelling more than 1,500 miles before is sits on your plate and you eat it," she said.

"When you factor in how far we are from the major food sources, that’s another 1,000 miles. Quite often any meal you sit down and eat could have come 2,500 miles so when you start thinking about the greenhouse gas emissions, all of that, it’s a worrisome thing.”

She said eating locally is also about a change in attitude.

“I know too, when I want a treat and I see those beautiful strawberries in February you buy them, but you do have to change the way you thinking if you’re getting serious about what you’re eating. Quite often if they come from another country, you don’t know what their standards are as far as pesticide use and that kind of thing,” she said, adding that the more people buy locally, the less they have to worry about tainted food.

Keeping with the eat locally movement, NEAT will also host a canning workshop at the Harvest Festival this weekend.

She said she thinks the canning workshop will be interesting, as many people have been getting out of the habit of canning their produce and it’s in danger of being a lost practice.

“People think it’s this arcane complicated process and it’s really not that hard,” she said, adding that the Northern Health will be on-hand to talk about food safety and sterilization.

NEAT hopes to put on a "NEAT night" once a month to increase community involvement. About 20 people packed into Patch Java last night for the movie, which she said was a great turnout.

“We would like to see more and more people get involved because the more people you get involved, the more outside interests you start becoming aware of and you can work that into further programs and it snowballs in a lot of ways,” said Thompson.

“There’s a lot of interests and a lot of different levels of awareness about what is available and NEAT wants to make sure everybody knows we’re here to answer those questions.”