by Tea
Doing the Eat Local Challenge can be a funny thing. As with any goal setting, it can make you feel bad when you fail to meet them completely.Dang, I used crushed red pepper flakes when I cooked dinner on Thursday.
That lunch on Wednesday, at the Russian restaurant—I bet their produce wasn’t local.
And there was that small piece of rugelach I succumbed to while grocery shopping; I know wheat doesn’t grow in this area.
But I have a choice. I can feel bad about my tiny failures, or I can turn the equation around and look at what I have done in the past week. More specifically, I can look at where my money has gone:
$2.99 for yogurt from an all-organic dairy near Point Reyes.
$23 at the farmers’ market, supporting five different local organic farms and one local cheese producer.
$20 at a local restaurant run by a Russian immigrant who makes her own preserves.
$21.17 for general groceries at a cooperatively owned health food store where the workers decide all store policy and they list the farm and location of all their produce.
$2.76 for rice from a local family run organic rice farm, in operation since 1937
$9 for a bottle of locally grown olive oil, cold pressed and unrefined. The operation is run by a first generation Italian immigrant family, all four of their sons involved in the business.
$21 for an organic produce CSA box from a local farm founded by a husband and wife. Their eight-year-old twin sons like to help packing the CSA boxes on Tuesday nights as it allows them to stay up later than normal (though to be fair, that $21 should be in next week’s tally, as the box won’t come until Wednesday).
When I look closely, I realize that everything I purchased this week—every single cent I spent, aside from gas, tolls, and parking—was either locally produced or sold by a local company I believe in. Even that piece of apricot rugelach was made by a local bakery and sold at a cooperative health food store where all the signs are bilingual, they close up shop in honor of Pride Weekend, refuse to stock GMO products, and actively fight for the integrity of organic standards. All the businesses I patronized are doing something good in my community, something I find valuable and want to support.
I’m even taking it out of the realm of food and making a point to patronize other local businesses—the five and dime shop in my neighborhood, the local hardware store, an independently owned bookstore (well, I do that all the time—I work in publishing and it is all too clear what is at stake there—Border’s-Barnes & Nobleville, here we come). Even the flowers I bought as a gift were local—grown in Half Moon Bay, twenty minutes down the coast from San Francisco.
When I look at the impact of my actions, the positive outcome of my choices this week, it feels pretty nice. We do vote with our dollars, our choices today influence the type of community and world we live in tomorrow. No I wasn’t perfect, but you don’t have to be perfect to do good.
When not trolling farmers' markets in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tea can often be found writing the blog Tea & Cookies, a series of food essays and recipes.
