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MENDON, ILL. -- Chuck Lubbert has eaten local his whole life and now he wants you to do the same. His 80-acre farm has everything from vegetables, to cattle and chicken and it's all organic.

"We raise them organically to get the nutrition back into our food which we need, and it's not in our regular food when it comes thousands of miles away from us," Lubbert said.

Knowing where your food comes from and how it's grown isn't just important for your health, but also for Mother Earth. The average food item on your plate travels 1,500 miles.

"That uses a great deal of energy," Edwin Waters, the Western Illinois Sustainable Agriculture Society president said. "It uses a great deal of labor just to transport it. Transporting it means it's in storage for a long time. It also means you have to build a lot of highways, a lot of trucks and breathe a lot of air pollution."

Or, you can cut down the miles your food travels and buy local, an idea Carmen Fischer, director of the school lunch program at Rockwood School District loved.

"The product is so good, it's fresh, they've harvested it the day before they deliver it to my warehouse and then, we send it out to the schools," Fischer said. "There's less waste in the product like with lettuces and things like that and it just tastes so good. It's important to support the local economy."

"It helps keep money in circulation here instead of going thousands of miles to somebody who's growing, usually a large corporation is growing the food," Waters said.

The next time you go to buy groceries, think about where your products are coming from and how they're grown because after all, "we are what we eat," Lubbert said.