www.eatlocalchallenge.com

Is it over?

by Expat Chef

I woke up Saturday feeling a bit lost. The feeling continued even as I took my little one to the park to play. Across the lot, the children’s farmstead and petting zoo was empty and locked up tight for the winter.

She looked longingly across the way. “I want farm,” said the sad little voice.

“So do I, honey, so do I,” I said.

You see, last weekend was the last of the farmer’s market days for the season, and the last of the children’s farmstead days as well. Both of these things had been a huge part of our weekends for months now. Seems like nothing went right the whole rest of the weekend. Life just wasn’t normal. How could all this be over?

The Harvest

By Expat Chef

If you are the kind of person who does not like getting homemade food gifts from friends, maybe you just don’t have the right friends. Last weekend I turned 40, and my “adopted” Italian family brought me two huge jars of tomato sauce, and four quarts of peaches sliced and frozen — all from their Italian grandparents’ backyard in rural Kansas. Four pounds of fresh homemade pasta sealed the deal as THE BEST food gift ever.

As painful as turning forty is mentally, this year’s Eat Local challenge has really given me an appreciation for my birth date.  What time of year could possibly be better than early harvest time? The summer’s last luscious bounty filled the market tables alongside the first of the apples and hard squashes. There is something amazing about this overlap of seasonal produce. It almost feels like cheating to have both summer and fall at once.

The weather reflects the same perfection; cool nights and warm, not hot, days with a light wind. The kind of day that makes you never want to go inside until the last ray of sun is gone. It’s such a brief and wondrous time of year. As sad as it is to see the summer fade, knowing that winter is coming and my farmer’s market will close at the end of this month … I can’t help but love the harvest season. Perhaps, like each fruit and vegetable of the challenge, consumed at its brief peak of ripeness, this harvest, too, is meant to be appreciated all the more for the coming winter.

Many thanks to all of you who participated in this site, I really enjoyed the summer's challenge! Thanks to Jennifer for putting this together.

You can find the Expat Chef in her kitchen inventing every new recipe imaginable with her favorite squash: pumpkin.

Onward and Upward

by Sara Zoe

I started off my post-August-challenge day with an avocado (on locally made bread, local eggs, local salsa, and local cheese). The lunch I just finished was peanut butter with locally made bread and my own raspberry jam made with very very local raspberries (and a totally non-local lemon and some sugar from who knows where). Next up, prosciutto.

But the avocado, peanut butter, and prosciutto were all carefully chosen: purchased at locally owned, independant stores. The peanut butter and prosciutto were produced by small scale companies, barely known.

And thus begins September's challenge, a continuation, but with a more relaxed rules.

My Eat Local Month

By Marc

During the month of May, I challenged myself to cook only ingredients from within a 100-mile circle around Berkeley, California.  It was a learning---and sometimes yearning---experience for me to limit my ingredients so much (in one of the most agriculturally diverse areas in the nation, to be sure).  This post is my attempt at a summary of my experience.

I had many conflicting thoughts during the challenge (for example:  the sugar snap peas are so delicious; there's nothing to snack on;  sugar glazed local pecans are amazing; some tofu would be ideal in this stir fry, but it's way too far outsider the circle;  these local eggs make remarkable frittatas), so as I try to sum up my month of Eating Local, I keep thinking of the beginning of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.  You know how it goes: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,..." and so on. It seems ripe for adaptation into a description of my month of cooking and eating local, but I won't subject you to that potential literary disaster (feel free to give it a try in the comments...here is the full text of the novel).

Cracking the Eat Local Code

by Holly

Patrick posted some of his end o' ELC thoughts a while back, but I've been stewing on mine for a while.

I had surprisingly mixed feelings at the outset of the challenge, after my initial burst of "right on!" when Patrick mentioned the idea. I tend to be a bit compulsive, and until I relaxed and let myself have spices from who knows where, and olive oil from California, I was feeling a bit caged. I think this is in no small part because we are still finding our place in our new city.

Lessons I Learned (or: Fanatacism in Moderation)

by Julie Cummins

photo: Star Route Farms, Bolinas, CA

Now that I've gotten some perspective on my somewhat extreme pledge to eat (almost) entirely local for the month of May, here are a few of the lessons I learned:

1. I, like all residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, am blessed. Many of the raw ingredients I eat are available from nearby producers who use relatively sustainable methods. The Challenge was a lot easier for me than for participants in places like Colorado and New Hampshire. The climate-moderating influence of the Pacific, the excellent soils, and the culture of food converge to make this one of the easiest places to eat all local, all the time. 

This disparity hit me when, towards the end of May, I traveled to Bend, Oregon for a friend's wedding.

Interview with an ELC Newbie

by Birdsong S.

Stacie is one of my virtual friends (no, not like the imaginary ones of my youth - you will see, she is very real).  We met through a group knitting effort, and read each other's personal blogs regularly.  She got very curious about the May Eat Local Challenge when I began promoting it the month before, and although she had some trepidations, decided to plunge in and give it a go.

As May wound down, I decided to interview Stacie, an eat-local newbie, to see how things went...

First off, tell us a little about who you are, where you live, rural, urban, etc.

My name is Stacie, and I am 36 and a mother of two little boys, 2 and 4 years old. I work a few hours a week at the local paper, and I love the extra time it gives me to garden, and knit, and blog. I live in NW Illinois, in a town of 2000 people.

Let the Eat Global Challenge begin...

Or, at least, let us return to eating from California.

by Patrick

Yesterday, noticing a severe bareness of cupboards, we went to our local supernatural-market, New Seasons, to stock up on some basics. As it was the last day of May, we decided that the Eat Local Challenge was officially over.

Our Eat Local Challenge has been a heavily nuanced affair; we've made exceptions, we've lived without certain things and either found replacements or found that we didn't miss them so much . . . and then there are the things that we have lived without, and that I am really glad to see again.

Report from North Carolina

The Eat Local Challenge got some press today in the Southeast in the Greensboro, North Carolina centered News and Record.  What a nice way to finish the month!

The market for local foods in this area seems to improve with each week.  If you love to cook, your choices are nearly limitless.  Nearly every kind of sustainably raised meat and poultry is sold at the farmers' markets, and a couple of vendors bring fresh seafood from the coast.  There are several farmers who raise vegetables in hoop houses and greenhouses, extending the seasons.  Delicious baked goodies and jams and jellies abound.

The biggest challenge that I have seen is connecting the restaurants with the local farmers and cooperatives.  Hopefully our local Slow Food convivium will be successful in bringing more of these together.  I missed eating out for lunch, and I found out that a couple of restaurants that I thought served local foods did not - after I was seated, unfortunately!  In one case, I discovered that the staff thought that buying from a locally-based food distributor meant that they were buying local food.

Hitting the Sweet Spot

by Cookiecrumb

Everything tastes good! Even my savory dishes are inexplicably sweet, but not in a sugary way. Butter tastes sweet. Onions taste sweet. By god, the other day, hamburger tasted sweet.

Sweet! Oh my.

Last year I described the transformation I experienced after a month of eating locally as "rehab for my taste buds."

I haven't used sugar for 10 months, except for the occasional gummi bear, so I guess I have a whole new definition of "sweet."

I attribute this sensation not only to restricting my food to the 100-mile foodshed, but to the undeniable fact that the food is fresher — because it's local! Fresh peas are sweet. Fresh fish is sweet. Fresh yogurt is sweet.