The herbivore vs locavore smackdown

Tags

Eat Local Challenge, gardening, sustainability, vegetarian

 

Okay, I’ll just come right out and say it: The 2008 Local Food Challenge was not the transcendent experience I anticipated. Suddenly confronted with surviving on mostly starches and dairy, I gained five pounds the first week and promptly developed chronic indigestion.  Chocolate and avocados haunted my dreams.  Was it enlightening? You bet. Was it fun? No way.

On the positive side, the Challenge provided an ideal opportunity for The Perfect Man to master his techniques for making butter and cheese.  And, in the absence of spinach or broccoli, we discovered that fresh-picked kale makes a very respectable quiche. But drawbacks included large amounts of gasoline required to round up a very limited variety of veggies… and large amounts of time required to prepare basic ingredients.

I have enormous admiration for the brave souls who shepherded their entire families through the long month of local-only menus. Ang Jordan at Gulf Coast Local Food is at the top of that list, because she’s right here in south Alabama, where sustainability is a new and exotic concept. (Ask someone in Mobile if they support CSA, and they’re likely to assume you mean the Confederate States of America.)  Then there’s Cafe Mama, who writes about her local food quest in prose as spare and sweet as poetry. And Sarah Beam makes it all sound easy at Recipes for a Postmodern Planet.

Call me a curmudgeon, but my mood soured by the middle of the second week — around the time that I ran out of innovative ways to cook sweet potatoes.  When I turned to my fellow bloggers for inspiration, their posts sounded so…so… chipper. Was it possible that I was the only cranky Challenge participant, a vegetarian doing without vegetables, grumpily counting the days until the local-only pledge would finally end?

Well, bad attitude and all, I may have actually whittled away at the old carbon footprint much more than I thought — just by being a longtime herbivore. According to a study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, raising animals for food results in more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined. Yikes.  But here’s the good news: even a modest reduction in meat consumption takes a big bite out of fossil energy use. 

 On Saturday, I accompanied The Perfect Man to a last-chance plant sale at Mobile Botanical Gardens. All the unsold plants left over from their annual autumn sale were offered at bargain prices. Fun! We brought home two big Bengal Tiger cannas, a new Louisiana iris for the water garden, a pot full of pineapple sage and a tiny container of the whimsical succulent my grandmother calls “hen and chicks.” Our loot is pictured below, but excuse the camera strap dangling in the upper right corner. It was early, and I needed some coffee.

 

Forbidden Fruit

Tags

Eat Local Challenge, food, gardening, green living, sustainability

                                               With apologies to Titian.

Last night, I dreamed about apples — tart, juicy Granny Smiths; shiny Macintoshes; Golden Delicious with the mellow taste of autumn beneath their skins. I dreamed of glistening chunks of apple piled on a plate, just waiting to be speared with my fork. They looked delicious. And then…and then…

I woke up. It was Day 6 of the 2008 Eat Local Challenge, and if there are apples grown within my 200-mile range northward from the Gulf coastline, I haven’t found them. Nor bananas. Nor rice. What I HAVE found in generous abundance are sweet potatoes. I got out of bed and had a plump, baked sweet potato for breakfast.

As a longtime vegetarian with a big organic garden, I didn’t realize how dramatically my diet would change with the onset of the October challenge month. Before last week, the major part of my daily food intake consisted of fresh fruits and vegetables, grains and soy. I occasionally ate bread, and my moderate dairy consumption came mostly in the form of homemade yogurt and cheese. I drank lots of juices.

Now, under the 200-mile rule, most of those fruits and vegetables are off limits. It’s planting time in our subtropical gardening zone, so all our winter greens and cole crops are mere seedlings this month. Kale, bless its fast-growing heart, will be ready to start eating next week. But the rest — four types of lettuces, three types of cabbage, the broccoli, cauliflower, collards, field peas and butternut squash — are weeks and weeks away from harvest. So, I’m eating LOTS of whole-grain bread and LOTS of our homemade dairy, which has been an unpleasant surprise to my fruit-and-veggie-based digestive tract.

Suddenly, shopping for vegetables has taken on a treasure hunt aspect. My Saturday trek to the weekly grower’s market was disappointing (plenty of candles, flowers, handmade soaps and honey, few edibles) until we spotted a table selling eggpant. Yay! And a pint jar of blueberry preserves from a neighboring county. Yesssss! I found some leathery-looking Alabama green beans in a neighborhood market this weekend, and — hallelujah! — some fresh squash from a grower in Lucedale, Mississippi (50 miles from home). I discovered on Saturday night that tiny red potatoes, roasted in the oven, taste even better when they’re seasoned with thankfulness that the soil they were pulled from lies only a little way down US Highway 98. Like pieces in a culinary jigsaw puzzle, we fit together a half-dozen zucchini here and a handful of green tomatoes there, as we find them. I’m learning that practically every item in the average grocery store —  roughly 50,000 different items — has been hauled here from somewhere far away. I’m learning to be flexible. I’m learning a deep appreciation for simple meals.

But man, oh, man. An apple sure would taste good.

2008 Eat Local Challenge, Day 2: A peek inside the pantry

Tags

Eat Local Challenge, food, gardening, sustainability

My significant other, The Perfect Man, designs and builds homes. His houses are not large, but he uses light and form to create a comfortable sense of spaciousness. A cupboard tucked here, a window seat there, a cozy set of bookshelves… and the result is a house that quietly comforts and nourishes the people who live within its walls. When it comes to square footage, substance beats size every time.

That’s how I feel about my kitchen pantry today. My groceries are all about substance: no frozen veggie burgers, no boxed snack crackers, just a few fresh local ingredients.  At the close of the second day of the 2008 Eat Local Challenge, there isn’t much in there. But there’s enough.

Breakfast was three locally grown satsuma oranges and a cup of coffee. The satsuma, familiar to most people in the form of canned mandarin oranges, is coldhardy enough to grow here along the Gulf Coast. Late in the nineteenth century, sprawling groves of the sweet little citrus covered hundreds of acres just to our east, in Baldwin County — until brutal freezes in 1894 and 1895 brought a quick and icy end to large-scale Alabama orange cultivation.  Since then, they have become a favorite of backyard grovesmen (The Perfect Man has several young trees) and small farmers. Tiny, leather-skinned and sweet as honey, they are scrumptious replacements for my usual morning glass of commercial orange juice.

I made the short trip to a family farm market across the bay in Daphne, scoring a few more provisions for the pantry shelf: Mississippi sweet potatoes; coarse grits and corn meal from a Louisiana town 20 miles inside my 200-mile limit; local peanuts still in their big, knobby shells. And wonder of wonders, on a rack near the cash register was one lone remaining loaf of walnut wheat bread just waiting for me to invite it home for lunch. (It was made by Jane Holland Smith, The Bread Lady, who works her bakery magic in a special kitchen she built next to her house. She’s always my first stop during our downtown farmer’s market season.)

Alas, the locally grown zucchini I bought never made it to the pantry at all. Atticus assumed that the green oblong was a strange new chew toy. Judging from the expression on his face, it was very tasty.

Bye-bye, bananas — I’m taking the Eat Local Challenge

Tags

Eat Local Challenge, garlic

 

I had to think it over for a couple of weeks, though, before logging in at the Eat Local Challenge site to register. After all, it’s a big commitment: an entire month of eating ONLY food with ingredients produced within 200 miles of my front door. With three exceptions — spices, coffee and wheat flour — everything on my plate and in my glass during the month of October will come from local producers.

Between now and October 1, I’ll work on tracking down some local sources for eggs and dairy. Vegetarian since childhood, I’m spared the task of finding locally raised meat, whew! The Perfect Man canned relish and tomato sauce from our summer crop, so that will help. Plus, he already makes our mozzarella cheese and yogurt each week. (I’m telling you, I’m one very lucky girl.)

I know it won’t be easy; convenience foods and our favorite restaurants are instantly disqualified. We won’t be seeing any rice for a while, or bananas, or tea, or…oh my gosh…chocolate. But there are some positives, too: good reason to visit the artisan cheesemakers’ farm in the next county, and to network with gardeners who might like to swap veggie varieties, and to learn some new make-it-yourself skills.  Stay tuned for periodic posts in October as the Eat Local Challenge gets under way…

Meanwhile, I’m still slogging along in the home stretch of an illustration job, but The Perfect Man spent the day working on a raised bed soon to be planted with onions and garlic. Last year, having neglected to order any of the tempting and exotic garlic varieties we admired in seed catalogs, we simply bought a bagful at the grocery store and broke up the cloves to plant. They turned out fine — we have a nice long row of them drying on the back porch of the art studio — but we aspire to plant an entire garlic palette this fall. Anyone have a favorite garlic to suggest? I’d love to add it to our wish list!