Moved!

I'm now blogging about growing and eating local food at Dirt to Dish.

November 25: Buy only local

With the holidays upon us we'll all be spending on food for feasts, as well as gifts, decorations, and who knows what else. While retailers may see this season as the time when they're finally "in the black," we parents know that we can often feel like we're hemorrhaging red. Why not spend sensibly this year, and while we're at it, spend locally?

The Think Local Campaign, a project of the Sustainable Business Network of Portland (SBNP), is promoting the annual Buy Local Day, which is the first Saturday after Thanksgiving, November 25th. As you head out to buy food for your holiday party, or tackle your gift list, see if you can buy a locally-produced item, or at least shop at an independent, locally-owned shop. Not only will you be using your dollars to support a sustainable way of living but you'll be putting your dollar right back to work in our own community.

But if you can do it for one day, what's stopping you from buying locally for the entire holiday season? To find local businesses who use local products check out SBNP's Local Business Search Tool. You'll find plenty of the usual suspects, but there are some businesses on there that may surprise you.

Lessons from Local Chefs: Great food, sometimes cheap!

From FOODday: The Oregonian's FOODday had a great article about how to make delicious, budget-minded meals with in-season fresh ingredients. They still sound more complicated than what I can whip together during "the witching hour"--that time when everyone's hungry and whiney and DADDY STILL ISN'T HOME FROM WORK--but I'd try these on a weekend or when we're having friends over for dinner.

The article is called "Chefs can cook cheap, too." One of the greatest things about these recipes is they give you a cost per serving!

From In Good Taste:

Local cooking shop (cookware, wines, specialty foods and classes) In Good Taste is offering a class in local food cooking this Friday night (10/27) called 100 Mile Radius Meals: An Adventure with Sustainable Foods, hosted by local chef Barb Randall.

This one is not so cheap: $95 per person. As a major splurge, my husband and I are attending. The people at In Good Taste say we sit, sip wine, and watch the demonstration. I imagine this is going to end up being a date night with a show of food that I'll likely never cook unless it's a very special occasion and someone has spirited my kids out of the house. But it sounds like fun!

The Omnivore's Dilemma

I'm finally diving into The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I've been hearing him on various NPR programs all summer and his research on the role of corn and petroleum in our industrial food system is what made me take a closer look at what my family is eating.

My first reason for seeking out local sources for our food was to cut down on our reliance on fossil fuels. Even organic food can be heavily dependent on oil. People want food that's out of season, and that means shipping it from another part of the country, or the world. With all the bloodshed, destroyed farmlands and polluted air caused by our overuse of oil, we decided we had to start doing our part to reduce our consumption.

Last year we bought a 1999 Ford F250 diesel, replacing our newer gasoline F150, so we could run biodiesel. (Do we need a truck that big? That's debatable. But I like it for hauling when I'm working in the garden and my husband usually takes the train to work, so it doesn't get used every day. Even when he does drive to work his commute is all of 10 miles roundtrip.) We're interested in converting to straight vegetable oil, but it's an expensive conversion ($2k - 5K). We also didn't think we could find the time to scour the city for used oil, but there are biodiesel co-ops popping up all over now, which is making the idea all the more attractive.

But do you know what is the real problem with our industrialized food supply? Corn.

Seriously. Corn.

(You can hear a piece about corn's role in our food supply at this link to a broadcast of NPR's Day to Day, from November 27, 2003. From the website: "Mike Pesca goes beyond the dinner table to report on corn -- the cheap, ubiquitous grain that has a big impact on diet, public health, and politics.")

Corn is in practically all foods: breads, meat (the cows eat it), soda, juices, yogurt, on and on. Pretty much, if it's not a fresh vegetable it's got corn in it, or it ate corn. And why is this a problem? Beyond all the fossil fuels it takes to fertilize corn, harvest corn and transport corn and corn products, high fructose corn syrup plays an insidious role in the sharp increase in the number of cases of diabetes and heart disease in this country.

Another problem: the majority of cattle are fed corn, which isn't what they're designed to eat. That would be grass. Since these cows are fed a product that isn't ideal for them they're more prone to disease and thus, are given antibiotics. The decrease in the effectiveness of antibiotics doesn't just stem from over prescription of these medications to people, but also from their pervasiveness in our food supply.

Our food system may be fueled by oil, but the food itself is made from corn. Talk about overdependence.

At our house we try to limit our packaged goods consumption, and therefore, our corn consumption. But with kids, it's hard to avoid. In fact, one of Clara's favorite snacks right now is corn flakes. A quick scan of my pantry shelf revealed that half of the canned soups, beans and sauces I buy contain some kind of corn product.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed! Michael Pollan said in an interview that the title of his book refers to a concept that anthropologists study: when one is designed to eat many foods, which should one eat? As a mom, shopping the aisles of my grocery store, thinking about how much power I have over the state of the world by carefully considering my food choices, I sometimes find myself wondering "What CAN we eat?!"

Here are some resources to get more educated about local eating and the behind-the-scenes story of our national industrialized food system:

• The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.


• Powell's Books has a whole section on Sustainable Cooking.


• You can see a short interview of Michael Pollan on Amazon.com's Fishbowl with Bill Mahr. (Scroll to the middle of the page.)


• Hear interviews of Michael Pollan on two NPR shows:
  
  Fresh Air, April 11, 2006.
  From the NPR website: "Journalist Michael Pollan's new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, follows industrial food, organic food, and food that consumers procure or hunt for themselves, from the source to the dinner plate. It also examines the importance of corn in all of our food products."
  
  Talk of the Nation, April 14, 2006.
  From the NPR website: "In his new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, journalist and writer Michael Pollan argues that many Americans suffer from a national eating disorder based on super-sized, corn-fed diets."
  

Kruger's Farm Market

One of the best things about living in Portland is our close proximity to farms where we can buy lovely produce, get up close to the animals that give us food, and have a conversation with a real, live farmer. A farmer who told us that he sees his farm as "our farm" and that he is its steward.

Clara, baby Iris and I, along with our preschool class, made the trip to Kruger's Farm Market on Sauvie Island. There we got a tour of the fields with Farmer Don, a fit, energetic man who clearly loves children and has at least one small child himself. I was impressed that at least one kid in our group knew the name of every fruit and vegetable he showed us (even the brussel sprouts and the figs!), but then I'm always impressed Clara's classmates. They're kids who have a clear connection to the world around them.

The great find of the day was strawberries! Farmer Don grows a variety that is still sending up lovely, red delicious berries for $2 per pint. I can make more freezer jam after all!

(I eyed the honey Kruger's sold, which was from Washington State, since I would like to use it in place of refined sugar [which definitely isn't local to this region] but wow, it was really expensive. Of course, the economics of sugar are vastly different than the honey business. When I run out of refined sugar, I'll revisit this issue.)

We visited with the farm's animals: sheep, pigs, and a very sweet baby alpaca. (I CANNOT believe that I forgot my camera, but some other parents will hopefully send me photos soon.) Farmer Don bought baby chicks earlier this year and raised them into fine, fat chickens that lay about three eggs a day total, he says. Our kids are well-acquainted with chickens as Teacher Angela keeps them at the school and the kids get to peek in on their laying progress. Seeing them made me start building chicken coops in my head…I think I'd really like to get a few next year.

Next we climbed onto flatbed trailers piled high with fresh hay and Farmer Don drove us out to the pumpkin field. When I settled myself down into the hay, Iris sleepy and heavy in my sling, I noticed how soft and comforting the hay was, and imagined what it would be like to take a nap on a bed of hay, layered with thick, wool blankets. Why did we ever get away from using such a lovely, renewable resource for a basic household item like a mattress?

The clear, blue sky and bright sun made it a perfect day for the farm. I felt so lucky to be able to share a day like this with my daughters, getting them out to a source of fun and food just fifteen minutes from our house. I drove home, with my four pints of strawberries and a pumpkin in the back of the car, wishing I could buy all of our food this way all the time. Of course, we could, if we only shopped at farmers' markets. But how can we get our food rhythms and a roster of recipes in line with what's available locally, year-round?

Getting started with local eating

October may not be the best month to become a localvore, at least not in the Pacific Northwest. Many of the farmer's markets have closed shop, we're at the tail-end of the season's bounty. When I asked my delivery guy from Organics to You what I could expect from the winter box he sheepishly replied, "Lots of root vegetables and some sorry looking citrus."

But local eating doesn't have to be all or nothing. Just like we all learned in the waste recycling movement, reducing the amount of non-local food products that we eat can make a tremendous difference in our local economy and the world's environmental health.

My family is like many families: my husband and I both work, he in an office in downtown Portland, I have my own business and work at home.

We have a preschooler and a new baby. We like to cook and eat well, but we're not chefs and we need guidance in food preparation. And there is only so much time we can devote to grocery shopping.

So finding out where to get food staples, packaged foods and how to put it all together is a big challenge for us.

But we know it's very possible to choose a good portion, if not the majority, of our foodstuffs from local sources. We'll share what we find --recipes, sources and people who are doing their own version of local eating -- as we work toward eating a wholly Northwest diet.