By Lucette
Shopping for local food is slow shopping--no zip-through-the-aisles grocery trips, tipping boxes and cans into the cart. I went shopping yesterday at a local chain (2 stores), the Mustard Seed Market, which has a priority of selling healthy and organic food.
I go to the MSM about once every three weeks to stock up on things I can't find elsewhere--they have a comprehensive and voluminous array of supplements and alternative kinds of pills and treatments, organic food in fresh, canned, boxed, and frozen forms, and various kinds of natural, unfragranced, unobjectionable creams, lotions, sunblocks, bath oils, etc. It's one of 2 places in the Cleveland area that I can buy Tom's of Maine toothpaste, for instance.
But, I found yesterday, a lot of it isn't local...
which I might have known if I'd thought about it. I hadn't thought about it though, and I hadn't gone through the store looking at every label, looking for the tiny print that identifies place of origin. To MSM's credit, I did find some great stuff: asparagus from a local farm, local (Amish) chicken, cheese (also Amish), spaghetti sauce from Cleveland's Little Italy, milk from Harzler's Family Dairy (about 40 minutes away from Cleveland), MSM's own bread (locally produced if not sourced), and baba ghanoush and pita chips (both from Oasis). I did not find local lettuce or greens, which surprised me, since the farmer's market is overflowing with those.
In my label reading, I found that many (possibly most) products were from California (no surprise), many from New York state. Quite a few were from Pennsylvania, part of which is in my 100-mile radius, but the town names were unfamiliar to me and PA is a big state, so I didn't buy those, pending further research. There was a surprisingly small stock of local wines, maybe a total of 30 bottles, representing 4 different wineries.
This was quite an eye-opening shopping trip--I expected to find more local stuff at the MSM, whose motto (from their website) is "we'll save the world one bite at a time." Not that I would stop shopping there--it's a great place, and almost the only place in Cleveland with such a firm commitment to healthy food. But that doesn't necessarily mean local, which I'm thinking is the result of having to have an array of produce and products all year round. (In fairness to 
MSM, they do have more local produce in the summer months, helpfully labelled.)
A happy result of the MSM trip was dinner, sauteed chicken and steamed asparagus, see here for the barely-a-recipe on my blog.
Lucette writes, teaches, and gardens in Cleveland, Ohio, and blogs at www.vintagecook.blogspot.com.
