you can take the boy out of the midwest, but...

I was reading about one Santa Cruz resident's experiment eating only locally grown food, an idea that I think about a lot, and ran across this:

Happily I am not a coffee addict, but I do enjoy a cup of tea each morning. That goes too. Away with the exotic spices, salt and grains, none of which are grown in our area: no bread, pasta, oatmeal or granola.

I knew about the coffee, tea, and spices, but I grew up in southern Minnesota, and for all my worldly travels, it had literally never occurred to me that I might be more than one hundred miles from a wheat field.

Last week on a whim I bought a basket of Concord grapes. That's how I reacquainted myself with the nuisance of non-seedless grapes. They were tasty as all get out, but I was too distracted by trying to get the seed out of the way, or by the experience of crunching into a grape seed. So today I made grape juice! Or grape juice concentrate. We'll need to water it down some to make it palatable. Actually neither of us likes grape juice, but hey, now I can say I've made grape juice.