Welcome to our blog about our summer local eating experiment!! Pam and I are very excited to embark on this adventure, and the past couple weeks have been spent doing a lot of research and experimental cooking in preparation. First, though, let me give you an idea of why eating locally has become so important to me, and why I’m so excited for this summer!
Over the past couple of years I have done a lot of reading about a variety of environmental topics and how they are affected by my daily activities. Several books and authors in particular have helped me form the opinion that if we as a society are to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, one of the most important steps as we move forward is to think much more locally. Bill McKibben’s book Deep Economy and his more recent follow-up Eaarth, both of which I highly recommend, prove I think pretty definitively that we have already pushed our planet to its limits and we are now starting to experience some of the consequences of our careless actions built around the exploitation of fossil fuels and our obsession with constant growth. We’ve come to believe that the primary goal of human existence is to grow. Sure, that has produced unprecedented amounts of wealth and prosperity, allowing us to do incredible things never before possible. It has also produced immense gaps between the haves and the have-nots while poisoning our planet, possibly to irreversible (at least for the relevant future) levels. We have set in motion a series of events that are literally transforming the face of our planet, making it nearly unrecognizable in terms of historical norms for climate and other things (hence the title of McKibben’s book, Eaarth, representing this new planet that may look like our old Earth but is really fundamentally different). I won’t go into the science or the evidence, if you want that, start by reading Eaarth. Suffice it to say that I am convinced that we need to take dramatic action if we want to preserve any semblance of the planet that has sustained human life and allowed us to prosper for thousands of years.
Some of the other reading I’ve been doing has been about the joys and difficulties of local eating. One of my favorite books is Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which chronicles her family’s journey of moving to a farm in Georgia and, for one year, living exclusively on food that they grow or raise themselves or is otherwise found locally. It is a hilarious, moving, poignant story of the challenges, benefits, and really the incredible joys that come from eating food that is grown close to home. I resonated with a lot of what Kingsolver (and her husband and daughter, who also contributed to the book) said, having grown up on property with a wonderful garden and variety of fruit trees, knowing the pleasure, for example, of going out into the garden on a beautiful summer day, picking an array of fresh blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, and more, coming inside, throwing them in the blender and tasting the most delicious smoothie you’ll ever have! (It’s fitting that I’m writing this while sitting at the kitchen table at my parents’ house, staring out at their beautiful garden!) Something about growing your own food just makes sense. Not to mention how much better things taste directly off the vine or out of the ground compared with supermarket produce that’s been picked before it’s ripe and shipped thousands of miles. It’s just better. Period.
More recently I read a book called Plenty, written by a couple in Vancouver, British Columbia, who, in similar fashion, for one year ate food grown exclusively within a 100-mile radius of their home. Living in the Pacific Northwest myself, this book was that much more fun to read and really got me excited about trying to find more of my food locally. In this age of huge industrial monocrops and the grain belt and buying super-processed foods at the supermarket we’ve forgotten what can be grown right in our own hometowns.
For me this is about a lot more than just food – it’s about water conservation, waste reduction, treading lightly on the planet that sustains us and giving back when possible. That all comes together when it comes to the food I eat. For me, the choice between asparagus from Chile in December and waiting until May for asparagus from my parents’ garden is an obvious one. The industrial food chain that supplies most of us with food is absolutely drenched with oil. Oil for the chemical fertilizers. Oil for the tractors and combines of the massive industrial farms. Oil for keeping the crops cool and shipping them immense distances to wind up in our local supermarkets. Compare that with food that I have grown myself from seed, or purchased from the farmer who picked his produce the day before and brought it to the local farmers market. It’s a no brainer. Not only are the energy inputs monumentally less, but the food is both more nutritious and better tasting. Think of the other concerns. Climate change. Peak oil. National security. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
So, all that said, where am I going with this? For the last couple of years I’ve tried to make a conscious effort to eat locally whenever possible and to limit my impact on the environment through recycling, conserving water, trying to get the best gas mileage possible, riding my bike and the bus, etc. etc. But I want to do more.
That’s why this summer, with Pam to join me, we are going to do our best to eat 100% local food. The obvious things are fruits and vegetables, which are plentiful in Washington in the summer. Milk and eggs and other dairy are readily available, as are all kinds of locally and humanely raised meat. Flour and other baking ingredients have taken a little more research, but we’re finding things. Honey will be our sugar substitute of choice. As we go through the summer we’ll update you on fun projects like making our own bread and pasta, as well as things like sweet potato and beet chips, and so much more. We plan to acquaint ourselves well with the local farmers markets, we’ve signed up for a CSA (community supported agriculture) which will supply us with a box of fresh produce every week, and overall we’re very excited to embark on this adventure. So, please enjoy this blog, and we hope that our experiment will inspire you to think more about where your food comes from and consider joining us in our commitment to local foods.
Eat locally all summer long? Challenge Accepted.
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