Today was a very important day. I took my ACT! In order to eat a filling and lasting breakfast, I ate two scrambled eggs, peanut butter on toast, a banana, and coffee. It kept me full until about half way through. My brain was working extra hard, so it is not surprising I would get so hungry.
For lunch I ate butternut squash soup and crackers. Tomorrow is my last day and I am getting quite excited to be done with my Target diet. Though not as restricting as the local diet, it is still difficult to eat food from only one place.
Tonight I attended a wedding and was unable to eat Target food for dinner. It was very good food though!
I wanted to begin my conclusions on the project. Today I want to look at the negative effects of eating locally and tomorrow I will focus on the positive.
It was initially more expensive (as Nyla said in her comment, it could be cheaper in the long run due to less medical bills). None the less, I think for someone who was tight on money, it would be hard for them to fork out the cash for locally grown food.
It was time consuming. For someone with a busy schedule, it would take a lot of energy to prepare meals in advance and focus on recipes accommodating what is in season. It also takes longer to cook meals.
It was difficult to find local food. Eating locally has not hit the Midwest. While those ahead of the curve, like Seward Co-op, labeled every produce item, the average grocery store seems to have no concept of eating locally grown food. This made it extremely difficult (and time consuming) to find local food.
These are my three biggest complaints about eating locally grown food. Tomorrow I will discuss my favorite things about eating locally.
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One thing that helps in eating locally and bringing the cost down significantly are farmers markets and CSA shares, or community-supported agriculture.
ReplyDeleteCSAs are generally set up as a box of food each week that you're purchasing directly from the growers. While they seem expensive at $500-600 per year, that cost pales in comparison to buying that amount of fresh produce at a co-op, or even from a big box grocer like Rainbow or Target.
You can also get CSA shares that provide fruit, meat, cheese, winter shares (which are mainly a variety of root vegetables delivered in December and January) and combinations of these.
A CSA is overwhelming the first time you purchase one, as the volume of vegetables can be enormous, but you can easily adjust your diet (starting by eating less meat) and learning new recipes to put all that produce to use. After a year, you'll also start to see some foods that are good for canning or freezing, allowing you to stock up a little for the dry months of January, February and March.
Along those lines, doing things like going to a farmers market and buying a few bushels of sweet corn when it's at its best, cooking it, trimming it off the cobs and freezing it, also helps a ton. There's nothing like fresh corn bread made with your still-fresh-tasting frozen corn that was grown in the metro area.
On May 1st and 2nd, you can visit the Living Green Expo (http://www.livinggreen.org/) and meet some local farmers, CSAs, and families that raise livestock.
Keep this up! It's fun, it's a *great* way to learn to cook, and it gets easier as you learn to use stuff you've never had (or at least that I never had) like coriander root, things you've never heard of like kolrabi, or just things you've never cooked with like kale. Different recipes, especially varieties of stir-fries, can make for quicker meals than you can cook up hamburger helper.
I think one of the other approaches that makes local eating easier (and infinitely more affordable) is to start canning and preserving the harvest during the summer months when local food is plentiful. The selection may start to get scant during the months of March & April, but if you store up as much as you can, you'll have all sorts of local products on hand that you made yourself! Very gratifying.
ReplyDeleteAs a CSA farmer, I can attest to JTH's comment above. A CSA can definitely be overwhelming at first, but an incredible value in the long run, not to mention an extremely rewarding experience. The key is learning to eat seasonally, which may take a year or two to adjust to depending upon your habits to begin with. There are so many different CSA programs now for various types of foods, that it really is an issue of being able to budget for upfront costs rather than weekly trips to the grocery store. One also has to be sure to compare to similarly sourced foods in the grocery store too when you are looking at the cost, since CSA's were never designed to compete on price with nationally and internationally sourced foods. Keep up the good work!
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to figure out why you came to the conclusion that eating locally "hasn't come to the midwest." My guess is because you were having problems finding local foods due to the time year that you started this project.
ReplyDeleteMost people I know that eat locally do a lot of canning in the fall for the winter season.
I am hoping that you will post an update to show how your project has changed your eating habits now that you have had a summer to visit farmers markets and other places that would have local foods.
Thanks for sharing your project,
Nicole