Local Food Rant

Eating avos in winter? Lettuce in the heat of summer? Here’s the hard truth! We have gotten so off track on local food in just the last 30 years we don’t even realize what that means to our footprint.

~ I love world market foods, give me a Thai Green curry any day… But, let’s take a look at this addiction to variety, to exotic tastes…

In my childhood, (1960’s) hardly one had ever eaten an avocado or artichoke in the Midwest, and international food was a dream that was only real when you ate pizza (either in a restaurant on special occasions - or from a box mix)

This boredom was also unrelieved by hot new restaurants. Mostly people ate at home, in fact - they hardly ever ate out, except for church socials or community potlucks…this all a world from the past, from our rural heritage, and certainly a world that did not know what they missed…

Fast forward to today - where Trader Joe’s brings us Israeli cheese, Italian olive oil, and such things are very available in any corner market in the USA. We have gotten everyday habits that are going to be hard to break. Do we have to break the imported food habit? Is the 1500 mile salad, the supermarket dinner sustainable? To complicate things - we have gotten used to spending only 11% of our income on food, unlike most of the world - and getting the huge choices, big super sizes of everything as well!!

Yikes - time to reassess. Can we find happiness chewing on locally grown potatoes, broccoli in season, waiting for the peaches to come ripe? This is what local food means - grown nearby and in season. Your CSA shows the way - they give you a basket of whatever is ripe and ready to harvest in the garden. Try the Farmers Market for a great selection of timely foods, picked recently and by people you get to talk to while you handle their life’s work! Either is a simple and fun way to begin eating local.

Even more directly connected is your own garden, imagine how much more local can you get – than a 20 foot away dinner rather than a 1500 mile dinner! Check out your own slow food connection as you eat tomatoes that you grew – right off the plant, now that is a 1” dinner….the most local of all…now if only I didn’t need my hands at all – how much closer can I get? Mmmmm, a no-hands lunch! Ok, I am over the top – but you get the point… if I eat that tomato, ripe from the sun , my mouth filled with its just picked sweetness, I have just lowered my carbon footprint by a a factor of a thousand. Yay team! Let’s eat the imports, with grace and appreciation for their amazing availability, occasionally – as befits such luxury.  Here’s to your health…please pass the spinach!

Check out this site for a localization conversation-locallectual

Also the movie - The Real Dirt on Farmer John!