www.eatlocalchallenge.com

Thoughts on Sustainability

The challenge of this October Eat Local Challenge is turning out to be flexibility in the name of long term sustainability.

For all the right reasons, I ate out-of-town yogurt and out-of-town cheese this week (as you'll see when I post my food log). I usually make my own yogurt, not because I'm a homesteader or particularly ambitious but because I don't have a regular, convenient source for it. Making yogurt is a long process because of the six-hour incubation period and it doesn't fit neatly into my schedule: too much time for after work and too little time to run as I sleep or while I'm at work. I need a weekend day, and there are only so many of those to go around, especially in October. So, I ended up eating some of the yogurt I use for starter culture. And while my cheese came from a local producer, deeper research revealed that they source their milk from Vermont (just outside my 100 miles).

There is a local brand of organic yogurt to be had, but my favorite natural foods store doesn't carry it anymore. It seems that it's a slow seller because its consistency varies from week to week. This is a natural occurrence when you use real biological ingredients from nature and no "cheater" chemicals. You'd think that natural foods shoppers would prefer this, but it turns out they don't.

I used to be able to get that brand of local yogurt at a nearby organic foods store, but they recently went out of business because, as they said, "it has not been economically viable to continue with a philosophy of a truly (98%) organic store." To say that the owner was inflexible in his dedication to organic products would be an understatement. I feel that his rigidity did a disservice to the community. Perhaps a philosophy of 80-90% organic would have kept his doors open. Perhaps a degree of flexibility now would have better served his goals for the future. I took his going out of business personally--he went out of business right before the October ELC and I'd counted on them being a food source when I signed up!

The woman who makes most of my raspberry jam also makes fig jam. She grows the raspberries herself and they are organic. She buys the figs in a supermarket. She tried cultivating fig trees in the past, but the Connecticut winters were too much for them (even bringing them indoors). She mentioned that she may try again in the future. I imagine that each time I buy her locally-made-with-non-local-ingredients fig jam, I am part of the encouragement for her to try to grow them again.

I believe that if we buy from local producers even when some of their ingredients are not local, they will eventually realize there's a market and start producing for that market. I make a point of asking each time, "Where do you source your ingredients and do you think you could ever source them locally?" When you see not-exactly-local items in my food log, they represent a small compromise on the path to a bigger goal (and it's certainly not for lack of trying!).

One day, there will be a food store on my way home from work that carries all of the local foods and ingredients I need. The proprietor will be able to tell me where everything came from. Since this is my fantasy, they're also open past 6 PM on a week night.

Sophie lives and eats in Newtown, CT (just east of Danbury). She chronicles her adventures as a local foodie at Late Bloomers Farm.

What is a beautiful landscape?

My daughter and I are now in the Midwest visiting her grandparents, so all I was able to manage today was some more locally made bread for breakfast. I had intended to put some local organic berry jam on it, but when I cracked open the jar there was mold on top. So much for that. It's hard to lose even a little when you don't have that many options to begin with.

We made a day trip to Grant's Farm today (a sort of historical site/game park/family attraction outside St. Louis), and the highway goes straight through southern Illinois farmland. Having lived most of my life in the Ohio River valley and south-central Indiana, this is the landscape that feels like "home" to me. The open, gently rolling fields standing under a big sky, planted in corn, soybeans, or wheat, or serving as cattle pasture, punctuated by large single trees or little stands of forest, the clusters of farmhouses and outbuildings; seeing these vistas provokes a pleasurable nostalgia, a return to the backdrop for trips to my own grandparents and, later, my universities. It's harvest time now, and the fields are particularly attractive, glowing orange and tawny gold in the setting sun, the newly shorn rows of corn stubble proclaiming 'the human hand has been here.'

However, now that I'm invested in local and sustainable food, I'm reading other elements in these scenes, seeing the acres of monoculture and of crops that may be used for fuel instead of food; watching the huge combines and trucks that have become the symbol of industrialized, oil-driven agriculture; seeing the brown, dust-laden clouds carrying away vital topsoil to pollute our waterways and choke our oceans.

I think about the Eat Local Challenge and wonder what it would mean to these farmers if we were able to turn the agricultural system upside down; what would the fields look like then? Would they be unfamiliar; would they be beautiful? What would happen to the machines they've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy? Would the grain silos be empty? Is it possible some of them might return to using the magnificent draft horses we saw today for their original purpose? I wish I knew, and I hope we'll see the day when a reimagined landscape is not only possible, but profitable, and sustainable.

Angela Jordan is a stay-at-home mom, web designer, and local food blogger living in Mobile AL.

A Challenge for the Whole Family

by Sarah Beam

It is only Day Four of the 2008 Eat Local Challenge, and I've already tried three new recipes that will be added to heavy rotation at my house. Around here, eating locally during October (when the CSAs have ended their seasons and most everyone's personal gardens have gone to seed) entails much advance planning in that there aren't many available opportunities to actually purchase food grown locally. We have the Saturday farmer's markets in Athens and Watkinsville, and the Thursday pickups at Athens Locally Grown for the food that was ordered on Monday and Tuesday, but that's it. If I need eggs on Sunday, I'm out of luck. This is a sea change in a time of 24-hour supermarkets whose shelves are stocked with every imaginable foodstuff from around the world.

Maybe that's why they call this a challenge.

It is because of these purchasing limitations that I took some chances and picked up a few things we might not normally have bought. After all, I can't have us running out of food, now can I? And since a few of our usual fall-backs are currently off limits, most notably pasta, I'm finding myself willing to step out on a limb and get a little more creative with meal-planning. Frankly, this is right up my alley. I thrive on a good challenge.

My carnivorous husband generally tolerates more than supports my food purchasing proclivities so I had been more than a little concerned about how this local food pledge would affect him. One of my goals is to show my family why this is so important, not to teach them the virtues of self-denial. I want them to have as much fun as I am, to see this as an adventure, to be able to laugh at my missteps and foibles (and believe me, there have been more than a few), and to feel a sense of ownership and camaraderie when we do well.

Good thing my expectations aren't very high, hmm?

Amazingly, even when the odds have been stacked against us and time has been short and it would have been much easier to just open a box of pasta and toss it with one of the sauces I froze over the summer, my little family has thrown themselves behind me, transforming into my personal cheerleading squad, and cheerfully accepted one very late dinner and one less-than-satisfying dinner. And the tolerant carnivore who I had feared would roll his eyes at this whole undertaking? When the kids and I showed up at the Locally Grown pick-up point on Thursday, there he was, sitting on the steps in his work clothes, waiting to surprise us and to find out what the hubbub was all about.

I love my support squad. And I want so badly to make this worth their while.

So I have pulled down obscure cookbooks from high atop my shelves and I have picked up some ingredients we have very little (if any) experience with. The bread machine has earned a permanent home on my kitchen counter and I've scoured the internet looking for information on purchasing a pasta roller. I've learned how to make fried chevre, one of our long-time favorite restaurant items; I have finally mastered the art of making pizza crusts, thanks to my yard-sale bread machine; I have learned how to make sweet potato chips and succeeded in converting my husband from his former sweet potato spurning ways. Like I said, this is right up my alley. And I'm having more fun than is probably socially acceptable for a rural stay-at-home-mom just making dinner.

Sarah Beam cooks, eats and pretends to work just outside of Athens, GA. She chronicles her food neuroses at Recipes for a Postmodern Planet

A Peek inside the Pantry

by Val Webb

My significant other, The Perfect Man, designs and builds homes. His houses are not large, but he uses light and form to create a comfortable sense of spaciousness. A cupboard tucked here, a window seat there, a cozy set of bookshelves -- and the result is a house that quietly comforts and nourishes the people who live within its walls. When it comes to square footage, substance beats size every time.

That's how I feel about my kitchen pantry today. My groceries are all about substance: no frozen veggie burgers, no boxed snack crackers, just a few fresh local ingredients.  At the close of the second day of the 2008 Eat Local Challenge, there isn't much in there. But there's enough.

Breakfast was three locally grown satsuma oranges and a cup of coffee. The satsuma, familiar to most people in the form of canned mandarin oranges, is cold-hardy enough to grow here along the Gulf Coast. Late in the nineteenth century, sprawling groves of the sweet little citrus covered hundreds of acres just to our east, in Baldwin County -- until brutal freezes in 1894 and 1895 brought a quick and icy end to large-scale Alabama orange cultivation.  Since then, they have become a favorite of backyard grovesmen (The Perfect Man has several young trees) and small farmers. Tiny, leather-skinned and sweet as honey, they are scrumptious replacements for my usual morning glass of commercial orange juice.

I made the short trip to a family farm market across the bay in Daphne, scoring a few more provisions for the pantry shelf: Mississippi sweet potatoes; coarse grits and corn meal from a Louisiana town 20 miles inside my 200-mile limit; local peanuts still in their big, knobby shells. And wonder of wonders, on a rack near the cash register was one lone remaining loaf of walnut wheat bread just waiting for me to invite it home for lunch. (It was made by Jane Holland Smith, The Bread Lady, who works her bakery magic in a special kitchen she built next to her house. She's always my first stop during our downtown farmers market season.)

Alas, the locally grown zucchini I bought never made it to the pantry at all. Atticus assumed that the green oblong was a strange new chew toy. Judging from the expression on his face, it was very tasty.

Val Webb is an illustrator and clay artist living in Alabama.  Val's writing can be found on her blog, The Illustrated Garden.

The Breakfast Challenge

by Sarah Beam

As with most things in life, the first couple days of the month-long Eat Local Challenge were easier than I thought they would be in some ways, and more difficult than expected in others. Most surprisingly, breakfast turned out to be the biggest issue. We were already accustomed to buying all of our produce locally, so our suppers are almost always centered around fresh, seasonal vegetables from the farmer's market, our CSA, or the Locally Grown almost-co-op. Lunch has generally been when the kids and I polish off the previous night's leftovers, and for snacks we have lately been living off local apples and pears. So it was with some shock that I woke up on Wednesday to realize that breakfast was going to be the meal which would require the most planning. Who would have thought?

It's just that I've been making my own granola for a month or so now, and since none of those ingredients are local, I've given it up for the duration of this challenge. It's possible I'm just being legalistic. Locally-made granola is being sold at the our Farmer's Market and through Locally Grown, both of which strictly limit themselves to products grown or produced within 100 miles. The granola maker is obviously getting his raw materials from elsewhere, as is the bread baker and the coffee roaster. So since I am purchasing locally-made bread and locally-roasted coffee, why then am I sticking to the letter of the law on the granola issue?

I don't know. I'm just learning as I go here. For now, at least, I'm deeming granola off limits, even though all of us have become rather dependent upon it.

Thus it was that we found ourselves hungry yet flummoxed on Wednesday morning. Of all days to have begun this challenge too, since that is the only one out of the week when the kids and I leave the house by 9am, so a leisurely-cooked breakfast was out of the question. Granola would have been perfect, alas.

I did have some eggs from a local farmer, along with an absolutely stunning loaf of wheat sourdough bread from a local baker, so within a few minutes, I had thrown together fried egg sandwiches for all of us. The kids couldn't have been happier and though we were a couple minutes late getting to our appointment, and the baby arrived with a wee bit of egg in her ear, it turns out that those few extra minutes spent at the table together brought a little more laughter to our morning.

Today, with nowhere to be and nothing pressing to accomplish, I came to the abrupt and rather disconcerting revelation that I'm a little lazy at the onset of the day. While homemade granola sounds noble and industrious of me, the truth is that I was baking large batches of it in the evenings once a week so that it could be grabbed easily on bleary mornings. With a nursing baby in the house, all mornings, as it turns out, are a bit bleary.

I was not to be deterred though, least of all on Day Two, so I quickly cooked a ginormous batch of local stone-ground grits, and stirred in a couple pinches of local feta cheese. Both children ate like truck drivers until there was hardly any left for me.

Now that I've discovered the joys of long, languid mornings at the breakfast table, I'm looking forward to homemade cinnamon rolls, French toast with homemade syrup, and grits souffles. I think we might be onto something here.

Sarah Beam cooks, eats and pretends to work just outside of Athens, GA. She chronicles her food neuroses at Recipes for a Postmodern Planet.

A family eats local in Hawaii

Aloha!

Our family is off to a great start on our first day of local eating for the month of October.  Eating locally grown food in Hawaii poses some big challenges:

1. About 90% of our food is imported to our island state.
2. We're missing many of the more typical options for the biggest food group, whole grains. If we were true Hawaiians living off the land we would eat a lot of Kalo, the staple food for the old Hawaiian diet.
3. Since the closing of the final Oahu dairy we have no local milk or milk product options. The lack of dairy represents one of the biggest challenges for my family with two young growing children in need of calcium and protein. Yes, I know I can feed them with alternatives but I'm just not that good at it.  It's much easier in our busy day to dish a bowl of plain yogurt than to cook up a fish or some dried beans (which we don't have here anyway).  And yes, broccoli and green leafy veggies and even seaweed are all good alternatives for calcium but it's still nice to have a piece of cheese once in awhile.

With all of that I think we have come up with a good plan to feed ourselves for October:

• All of our fruit, vegetable, egg, meat and fish choices will be locally grown (local defined as grown on one of the major islands).
• We will use at least one ingredient from our own garden every day.
• Every dinner will be mostly if not all created from local ingredients.
• If we eat out we will choose restaurants that source local foods.
• We will focus on education outreach by talking to our friends and family and encouraging them to eat local foods too.

It's funny that I include the word 'we' in the plan when my family doesn't have much of a choice since I do all of the food shopping and cooking.  But they will be helping tend the gardens and decide what foods are ready to eat. And of course, the kids love to shop the farmers market with me so they will be participating that way.

Many of the exceptions I hear from participants are coffee, sugar, bananas and fresh grown produce year round. Whereas for us, we have these things but are missing grains and dairy. Coffee is grown on all the major islands, sugar is grown on Maui, we have bananas in our backyard and we can grow most things year round.

Dinner the first night:
Local romaine and red leaf salad with roasted beets and tomatoes and a basil macadamia nut vinaigrette
Local purple and white sweet potatoes, roasted in a solar oven
Local garden-grown corn roasted on the grill
Grilled Big Island Top Sirloin with a basil garlic sea salt rub
Bananas flambe and fresh starfruit, bananas were harvested from our tree a few days earlier

Debbie is a Ph.D. scientist and stay-at-home mom of two young children. She enjoys cooking, gardening, surfing and eating local food.

Eat Local Challenge Day 1: Little Bitty Circle

by Val Webb

I confess: I’m guilty of wanton lust. It happened in the aisle of our neighborhood Fresh Market this afternoon, when I was suddenly confronted with a display piled high with gorgeous imported chocolates. Here I was, on the very first day of the 2008 Eat Local Challenge – an entire month pledged to consuming only foods grown and produced within 200 miles of my front door — and I had wandered smack into the valley of the shadow of Godiva… my favorite luxury.

But I was headed for the produce department, and I was on a quest. The Fresh Market is a wonderful and eclectic grocery, a feast for the senses where classical music wafts overhead through air scented with exotic spices, and I knew it had the most impressive vegetables in town. Even better, every item is labeled with the area of origin. I live in a mostly rural state, in a city surrounded by agriculture: vast cotton and soybean fields lie just beyond the suburbs; I’ve seen sweet potatoes growing out there, and Silver Queen corn. So I naturally assumed that our local grocery stores would be well stocked with South Alabama produce, right?

Well, not exactly. Fresh from South America…Product of Mexico..Washington State…Carmel Valley, California. Feeling deflated, I spoke with a representative of the store’s produce section. He was kind and sympathetic, but he couldn’t help.

“Within 200 miles?” he repeated thoughtfully. “No, we don’t have a single thing. We had some local okra a while back, but we don’t have any now.” Suddenly, I felt the circle drawn on my map start to shrink.

My next stop was the organic produce counter at a spacious new health food market. I was surprised and disappointed to strike out again. The beautiful winter squash, broccoli crowns, tomatoes and onions, piled up in tantalizing pyramids, all wore cheerful stickers attesting to the fact that they had traveled more than 1,000 miles from farms in Mexico. (Amazingly, that’s still considerably less than the 1,500 miles an average food product travels in the US… a practice that gobbles up 100 billion gallons of oil every year. Check out the journey from the farm to your fridge with video artist Molly Scwartz in Watch Your Foodometer.)

“I’m so sorry,” said the young woman at the cash register in the health food market. “We’re working on getting a contract for some local produce. I don’t know if it will be this month.”

So, it’s going to be a skimpy menu at my table for a couple of days, until the first Farmer’s Market of the fall season kicks off downtown. We lost the contents of our freezer (including some of our summer garden bounty) last month when the door failed to close properly. But I won’t starve — outside, the tender baby kale is ready to be thinned. Our homemade yogurt qualifies for the Challenge, because it’s made from milk produced inside my map circle. Likewise the block of homemade mozzarella cheese, which I sliced at lunchtime and enjoyed with a big dollop of the green tomato chow-chow that The Perfect Man created from our summer harvest. Tomorrow evening, when I’m caught up on illustration work, I plan to do a little bread baking. It will be simple fare until Saturday, and then I’ll plot a course for next week.

Val Webb is an illustrator and clay artist living in Alabama.  Val's writing can be found on her blog, The Illustrated Garden.

Gary Paul Nabhan: Deepening Our Sense of What is Local and Regional Food

Editor Note:  Gary Paul Nabhan is one of the main reasons that I started this multi-year quest to eat local.  His book, Coming Home to Eat, gives us clear reasons about why to eat locally grown food.  I was thrilled this week to receive a post submission from Dr. Nabhan. This essay is sure to refocus my eat local energies, as it may yours, as Dr. Nabhan challenges us to look even more deeply into where our food is coming from.

Deepening Our Sense of What Is Local and Regional Food
By: Gary Paul Nabhan, RAFT founder

Now that Time magazine has done a cover feature article on the local foods movement and a book on the same topic by bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver and her family has climbed up the New York Times top-ten non-fiction list, we might want to ask what actually is it that we want to promote by using phrases like “Buy Fresh, Buy Local”. I can assure you that there will be increasing criticism of the so-called local food movement, building on the Hudson Institute’s feeble attempt to discredit it last fall in a variety of newspapers, with added absurdities being published in The Economist and by the American Farm Bureau. On the other hand, a reputable ethicist, Peter Singer, fears in his co-authored book The Way We Eat that 1) an emphasis on purchasing foods locally in U.S. communities will disadvantage needy producers in foreign countries-- as if India’s producers of Basmati rice actually gain much of the retail dollar spent on their rice in the U.S.--- or 2) the unethically raised beef or chicken will suddenly take over farmers markets and CSAs---as if Conagra and Tyson execs will soon be hanging out in overalls selling antibiotic-laced breast meat on Saturdays at their local farmers markets. I can predict, however, that more substantive critiques will arise, and I, for one, welcome them. It is time that we deepen our sense of what we mean by local and regional, offer others better reasons as to why these concerns matter, and steadfastly resist any pressure to endorse simplistic formulas such as a 100-mile diet or an in-state diet.

Here are some ways we can deepen what we promote by the terms local and regional: