www.eatlocalchallenge.com

What About The Celery

By VI

Baby it's cold outside.  Around me, there's a limited growing season and no year-round farmer's markets.  Yet, thank you very much, I still manage, some oranges aside, to eat local.  The hardest thing about eating local in Chicago: not managing your stock of root vegetables or wondering where you could put fifty pounds of potatoes. No, it's not having to eat all those root vegetables and potatoes.  While my family and I allow exceptions for things that do not grow around here, those oranges; we will not dabble in stuff that we can get, at least in season.  So, no matter how bad our apricot crop was this year, we will not get an outta region apricot.  Which gets us to the celery.  That's hard.  I got a head of celery this week, and it made me really happy.

To/Fro

By VI

My mantra on how's it going (Eat Local), has always been, don't ask me now, ask me later.  In other words, right now it's easy to eat local (say at the peak of farmer's markets), but I don't know how easy it will be in a few months when we are dipping into the larder.  After about two years of concerted efforts to eat local, there's a lot more now and a lot less waiting for later.  It really has not been that hard to remain local in our house.  Rather, just now is when it's just getting difficult to eat local.  In fact the hardest time for an eat local-er in the upper Midwest is this time of year.

I Like Eating Local

By VI

Jen gives us ten reasons to eat local. From a purely deliciousness point, it boils down to two things.  When food is sourced locally, it can be harvested much closer to its peak of ripeness--this would be the example of the pear, and when food is sourced locally, it is possible to obtain items that may be otherwise too difficult to market--this would be the example of the heirloom tomato. These reasons of deliciousness got me started eating locally.  Now, I have found, like Jamie S, that there is pleasure just in the fact of eating local.  In other words, I've come to find that if it is local, I find it more delicious.

Eating Local in the Upper Midwest

Us Eat Local foodies have certainly noticed the mainstreaming of our beloved.  I mean Whole Foods, smug in their corporganic inventory, realized, like Masons discovering Shriners, that there was a whole new degree of food coolness.  They have raced to embrace local.  In the store closest to me (at least), there are big signs proclaiming local, and little signs announcing all the stuff from nearby.  In addition there's a handy take-home explaining Whole Foods' committment.  Well, I guess they're trying and that's good.

That not so good picture, that's Gordy's in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.  They're trying too, but I got the impression their committment to eating local is not a recent revelation.

The Box

By VI

Spring CSA - Week 6

My friend, David "the Hat" Hammond told me the other day, as we went to Vie, a restaurant specializing in local food, that he would eat local if he lived in Sonoma.  It's something I and others hear a lot.  We could eat local if...especially if we lived in California.

Now, I cannot speak to the rest of the USA, but I can say that in the Chicago area, there are more resources than imagined.  Paul Virant at Vie explained to us all the ways he got local produce from fall through spring.  And I got my way, the off-season CSAs offered by Farmer Vicki.

The Box

Spring CSA Week 5

We did not subscribe to the spring CSA from Farmer Vicki in anticipation of the May Eat Local Challenge, but having the CSA surely makes the challenge that much easier.  In the Chicago area, it will still be a few weeks before the first farmer's markets open.  Vicki, however, using greenhouse technology provides me and her subscribers with a big box of produce each week.  And because of the greenhouse, our box includes, of all things in early May (for this part of the world), zucchini.

It's Too Late

by VI

May 1.  I begin the challenge with a pot of Colombian coffee (not even fair trade I sadly confess).  While I do lighten the coffee with milk that is roughly local, I realize the May Challenge is a failure. 

OK, it's not a failure, and it's hardly even started, but it's not the coffee I am worried about.  The problem is, to a large extent, that you cannot just jump into eating local.  Let's skip all the stuff about potsum vs. coffee or lard vs. olive oil or beer vs. wine--short term decisions on the challenge aspect of the challenge.  I'm talking about the need to be prepared, to plan, to look at the big(ger) picture.

The Box

by VI 

Spring CSA Week 4

[Note, my family has subscribed to a Spring CSA offered by a local Illinois farm called Genesis Growers --owned by "Farmer Vicki".  This CSA started in April and relies on greenhouses to get a head start on the growing season.] 

Farmer Vicki noted in her weekly e-mail that her spring greenhouse crops were not coming in so well.

"We have been having problems with one greenhouse in that the crops are not all getting ready at the same time.  It is frustrating, but so far I have not figured out why.  The only clue I have is that we did a poor job spreading the composted manure.  In some places it is thick and others, thin.  In this case, though I have been a poor diagnostician."