www.eatlocalchallenge.com

Reason 101 To Eat Seasonally: Total Gluttony

by Tea

Eating locally means eating seasonally. It means that those of us in the northern hemisphere are not shilling out for asparagus in the dead of winter—asparagus grown and shipped in from Argentina. Instead we savor baked butternut squash, salads of crunchy fennel, braised endive, and roasted beet salad with citrus dressing. It aint half bad.

But there’s something else that’s really great about eating local and seasonally, something they don’t tell you up front, and that’s the excuse for total and absolute gluttony.

You see the seasons don’t hang around forever. When a certain item is in season, you’ve gotta get your fill. No one can blame you either, it’s just common sense.

On Not Being Perfect

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:

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:

Where My Food Comes From

by Tea

When I was a kid I could have told you exactly where most of my food came from. I might even have grabbed your hand and dragged you out the kitchen door to the edge of the deck where you could see the big organic garden my mother tended. It was filled with rows of tomatoes, peas, peppers, zucchini. There was a patch of corn that my brother and I used to play hide-and-seek in, another patch filled with asparagus.

Next to the garden was the chicken house. A little further over was the compost pile. There were fruit trees as well—apple, pear, plum, cherry, and a dwarf peach tree that never gave us any peaches. There was a patch of raspberry bushes by the small creek, wild blackberries everywhere. If I were hungry all I had to do was grab an apple off the tree, or pop a cherry tomato into my mouth, bursting sweet and warm from the sun.