Day Two

Second day of eating locally! I did not eat anything for breakfast today because it is difficult to eat locally when you're on the go. For lunch I decided to make pancakes. Luckily we had Minnesota syrup on hand, otherwise we would have been eating our pancakes with honey. The pancakes had a different texture; when I was mixing them the batter seemed to froth. Locally grown food has a different texture. Turned out the pancakes were delicious and we ate locally manufactured strawberry applesauce to go with it.

I thought I did a really good job buying food at Seward's, but it already seems to be a little scarce. After work my mom and I decided to go to Lund's to hunt down some locally grown food. We found some more cheese and tomatoes, but they had nothing else in the produce section. The lady there told us we should have come three months ago or to try again in the summer. I have been told that numerous times. We tried to find local peanut butter, but no such luck. The best alternative was sun-butter, a sort of peanut butter made out of sunflower seeds. We were also very excited to find summer sausage for my lunch and wild rice sausages for dinner. We found pasties from Wisconsin and root beer! We also got, ice cream, egg, strawberry crisp, and yogurt.

For dinner we ate the pasties (a meat and potato filled pastry). My parents thought they were very funny by labeling our ketchup bottle as local. It got us talking about how difficult it would be to eat solely locally grown food.

I am confused on a few things. Firstly, I do not understand how packaged foods I bought at Seward's could be local. Do they grow all the ingredients locally or is it simply put together locally? Also, if something is manufactured somewhere, are all its ingredients from the same place? If you were not allowed to eat any packaged or frozen items while on a locally grown food diet, Minnesotans would need to be canning day and night all summer long. It would be very difficult to sustain this lifestyle without thorough planning.

This lifestyle is not for the short on cash. We have been very surprised to find that prices have been very high. My mom was shocked to find out that for $85.00 we only got that much meat. For $123.00 of groceries we could not have lasted a week. We racked up another $82.00 at Lund's (total minus plant, see receipt- click to enlarge). If you were not committed to this lifestyle it would be difficult to spend this much money on food.

It is also very difficult not having any fruit. We were discussing how people got their vitamin C in the olden days, but we still have not figured it out. It could have been that they stored apples and other fruit that can be grown in Minnesota. Or my mom said that potatoes do have a little vitamin C. I miss not having any fruit or juice. At least this half of the experiment is only for a week. I can't wait for Target week!