by Cookiecrumb
Last summer, shortly before the August Eat Local Challenge began, I went gleefully, manically shopping for pantry items like vinegar and mustard that were locally made by small companies.
I began dreaming up menus of dishes that would use produce from local farmers. Delirious inventiveness, oh joy.
I even found some grape leaves growing in my neighborhood, untended, and brought a bunch home to brine and then freeze for later (this was still July, after all, and I wanted to eat locally in August, dammit).
It was fun. No, I mean it was really loads of fun. A project! A plan! Structure, strategy, merit badges for my Girl Scout sash.
Looking back on it, it was also a game to me.
How well would I play? Could I outplay the others? Could I think of any way to “win”?
I ratcheted up the rules for myself: The first week, I would only eat food from the county I live in. Heck, I even tried to make my own Marin County sea salt. No one could touch me!
As August unfolded, however, I found myself learning unexpected lessons.
After a terrible guilt wallow because I had fallen off the wagon and eaten some non-local tortilla chips, I realized that ELC is educational, not mandatory. No one was going to come and give me 40 lashes with a limp, local scallion for “breaking the rules.”
But I still had rules. Was it playing fair if I grew my own food, or was the point of ELC to give local businesses my money? I grew tomatoes all summer long, raised a spindly bed of lettuces, and even foraged for aromatics (lavender, fennel, California laurel – which I failed to locate). Was it cheating to have gone to the nursery to buy a sorrel plant that might have been propagated more than 100 miles away?
Full disclosure: I had chosen not to give up my decidedly non-local English Breakfast tea, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the wine I enjoyed came from more than 100 miles away. I also chose to grin and bear it at restaurants that couldn’t possibly be expected to source all their products as rabidly as I was doing… though I only went to restaurants that practice good, local food policies as much as they can. So yeah, I’m flexible. Heh. A little.
It wasn’t total neuroticism. Positive thoughts occurred to me during the ELC. I felt regret when the end of August loomed, and then [::smacks forehead::] realized that I didn’t have to stop eating locally just because the “game” was over!
One of the best discoveries was that my food tasted good. Really good. So good, that meals could be smaller and still stunningly satisfying. My food bill was also lower because I wasn’t buying any processed items with their fancy, dumb markups.
Eating locally became something that I want to do all the time (within reason; I’m flexible – heh).
But the reality is that I don’t believe I can eat locally 100% of the time.
Things come up that thwart our best-laid plans: Epidemics, geophysical events, climate change.
I have a modest stash of earthquake/bird flu provisions, and nothing in
it is local. It’s all canned stuff, and it wasn’t canned by me.
This year, because the Challenge is set for May, we’re going to be facing less than robust produce in the market. In some parts of the country, farmers’ markets won’t even be open yet. In Northern California where I live, we’re only just now beginning to wade out from one of the rainiest seasons on the books, and that’s been hell on the farmers. So supplies are down.
And now that Iran is in the crosshairs of a madman, we face the possibility that our nations’s oil supply might be endangered. Oil at $100 a barrel is going to crimp food distribution. Farming is a razor-thin profit-margin business, and some local growers might decide to stop driving to so many public markets.
Finally, doomsday scenario: If a complete social meltdown ever happened, I’m pretty sure I’d eventually run out of those cans of Dinty Moore stew. I don’t know how long I could live on foraged fennel pollen alone. It would not only be impossible to eat locally, it would be impossible to eat.
Where am I going with all this?
I’m not so sure myself.
I think I’m saying that I absolutely endorse the Eat Local Challenge for all the right reasons – but it’s still a game I don’t want to stop playing.
I wanna win.
Cookiecrumb lives in Marin County, California, and writes I'm Mad and I Eat, a blog that carelessly weaves food and politics, and occasionally devolves into utter silliness.
