www.eatlocalchallenge.com

The best eat-local cookbooks

by Jamie S.

To begin to integrate local eating into your day-to-day life, you need to do a little research: Where do your nearby market gardeners sell their wares? Are there buying clubs? Community-supported agriculture plans? Farmers’ markets? How can you get hold of meat, seafood, eggs, and grains that are grown or caught sustainably in your area? Who has apples and strawberries in season?

This is a learning process, and--let’s be honest--it takes a while. Luckily, one discovery usually leads to another. Over the course of about two years, we’ve slowly become intuitive local shoppers. Honestly, we don’t notice anymore that we do it; we just have a different set of desires and values when it comes to buying food.

But for many would-be local eaters, cooking local food is just as challenging as finding it. So many of us are used to the effortlessness of convenience foods. Those of us who love to cook may tend to go to the grocery store with a list of items we need for certain recipes. Eating local requires you to start from the other end of the equation: This is what I have--now, what in the world do I do with it?

Liquid assets

I have a treasured little crackpot theory. It's that many foodways started off with a conversation something like this:

"Oh, no, what's happened to our [food item]?"

"Well, I don't care--I'm desperate!"

Surely it must have been that way with wine: Someone leaves fruit or honey-water alone for a while, maybe in a cave, and instead of just going sour, it turns into something delicious and celebratory. "Hmm! Let's try that again as soon as this headache goes away," our experimenter says.

But in the days before refrigeration, wine was not just a delicacy; it was an important food preservation method. Even today, it's a great way to put up a bumper crop.

A modest menu

by Jamie S.

We've just finished day two of our Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge effort, and I’m feeling pretty confident. You see, the way we eat every day lends itself easily to this experiment. I almost always cook more than we need for a single meal. It’s my usual practice to eat the leftovers from dinner for the next day’s lunch. It's nice--I get to have a nice hot (okay, reheated) meal without interrupting the flow of my workday or having to buy something extra.

Meaty issues

by Jamie S.

The Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge starts this Monday, so it’s as good a time as any to ask the question: Can meat be part of a local diet if you’re on a budget?

The pedantic ex-vegetarian in me is desperate to point out that if you are really serious about cutting costs, a veggie meal a couple of times a week (or more) is a great idea. But most people do prefer to have meat at dinner sometimes. Many Americans like to have it a lot.

So is locally raised meat out of reach of the average person, or is it an affordable luxury? Well, I can only speak for what’s available in my neck of the woods, but my experiences have been very encouraging.

For the love of citrus

by Jamie S.

One of the issues that always confounds local-foods aficionados is citrus fruit. Here in the U.S., unless you live in one of three states (Florida, California, or Texas), you're out of luck on the citrus front.

But "out of luck" is a problem. See, we Americans love citrus. Oranges, for example, are the third-most consumed fresh fruit in this country, just behind bananas and apples. We eat an average of 12.6 pounds of them every year. We suck down another 74 pounds' worth in the form of juice. No other juice even comes close to that.

Goblin Market

by Jamie S.

I spent the weekend before last in St. Louis for a wedding. I had Saturday morning free, so on Friday night I started plotting with a friend to go to the historic Soulard Farmer's Market. A local friend overheard us and shrugged. "Eh," she said. "You won't like it."

We went anyway, because--well, because I'm stubborn. And although a lot of it was the usual sprayed, buffed, shrinkwrapped, off-the-truck produce from who-knows-where, there was plenty of fantastic Missouri and Illinois produce too. I only managed to get about 15 feet into the open-air building before I was waylaid by a paper bag of locally grown Concord grapes--the last of the season, the seller said. I bought them immediately and sampled a few as we walked, discreetly spitting seeds.

Caught off guard by local foods

by Jamie S.

On Monday evening my friend Julie and I started taking yoga at a new place. The yoga studio is in a gorgeous, newly rehabbed old manufacturing building by the railroad tracks in Athens, Georgia. It’s a great yoga studio, and we’re going to keep going to it. But that has nothing to do with what I’m writing about here, which is the rather odd thing that happened to me after class.

As I was walking to my car, I was startled to hear someone yell “Hey!” from another entrance of the building. I looked up. A man, a woman, and two dogs were standing in the doorway of a wine shop called Shiraz. The woman waved her arm at me.

“Want to have a glass of wine with us?” she yelled.

Forbidden fruit?

by Jamie S.

Jamie Oliver calls his salad of fresh figs, prosciutto, fresh mozzarella, basil, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar "The Easiest, Sexiest Salad on Earth." And he's right. Oh, is he ever right.

But as far as I'm concerned, you can leave the prosciutto, cheese, basil, oil, and vinegar out of it and it's still the sexiest thing going. In fact, it'll be all I can do to stop myself from rolling around in it like Uncle Scrooge in his money bin.

Fresh figs are transcendent. If you've only ever had figs from a grocery store (or even worse, if you know of figs only from the inside of cookies) you're scratching your head right now. You'll just have to trust me on this. If you go to a local farm and get hold of, say, a few pounds of Italian honey figs--and if they're so ripe that they threaten to collapse at any moment--you will want to cancel all your appointments and lock your doors so you can be alone with them.

The farm behind Farm 255

by Jamie S.

Some of you may remember my recent post about eating at Farm 255. Well, this weekend I had a fantastic opportunity: I was able to visit Full Moon Cooperative Farm, the farm that supplies much of the restaurant's produce and serves as its inspiration.

Jason Mann, agroecologist and director of Full Moon, is also one of the three owners of the restaurant. He has worked with some of the best minds in the field, including Michael Pollan. He is word-tumblingly enthusiastic and engaging, and I think that within the space of one morning, he may have assimilated me into the biodynamic agriculture borg.

Field trip report #3: Honey extraction class

by Jamie S.

This spring my significant other and I took a beekeeping class at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia.

Concurrent with the beginning of the class, we bought two packages of bees from a huge south Georgia apiary that shall remain nameless. Early on, we could tell something was amiss. It was peak nectar flow, and the hives were surrounded by blackberry and tulip poplar blossoms; yet we never saw the bees outside the hive. They languished, drinking copious amounts of the sugar water we fed them, yet failing to draw out any comb or (in the case of the queens) lay any eggs. So of course, when the bees came to the end of their natural lifespans--about 40 days--there were none to replace them. Whammo, we were out of business.