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

[jfb]

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.

Comments

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

Hm. There's nobody harvesting sea salt from Monterey Bay? Guess it's too polluted.

kathrynt and I have a plan for processing salt after the apocalypse which we can trade with people over the mountains for wheat. And fish, and woolen goods.

[jfb.livejournal.com]

Idunno, I'm not sure the sea's gonna get cleaner after the apocalypse. Depends which apocalypse, I guess.

Cargill has a bunch of salt ponds at the south end of the Bay. I don't know if the article's author knew about that, but I suspect it's processed and distributed in such a way that you can't know whether the salt you're buying is from around here or not. Also, I read recently that the Cargill land will soon become either wetlands or condominiums.

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

The zombie apocalypse! It's more an "if the infrastructure totally broke down, how would we get food?" mental game. Vitamin C is the big stumbling block, because we couldn't come up with much to trade for citrus that people who grow it wouldn't have access to on their own. Of course, if the climate changes enough, all of the local food production knowledge we've got goes out the window anyhow. It ties in with "come the apocalypse, I have useful skills! I can make clothing from sheep! And preserve foods!" game.

You'd have to find a boutique saltmaker to know it was local, I guess. I know there are French companies that do that sort of thing, but don't know of any American ones.

Salt of the ummm earth?

[artname.livejournal.com]

In The Omnivore's Dilemma Michael Pollan talks [and talks and talks] about making a "local" meal here in the bay area. Among other things, he does harvest salt at what sounds like the Dunbarton salt ponds. He describes the overpowering metallic taste, and says that he couldn't get it past his nose without retching.

Re: Salt of the ummm earth?

[jfb.livejournal.com]

That doesn't sound better than not eating salt.

[bushmiller.livejournal.com]

I guess I don't see the point of exclusively buying "locally-grown" food in 2007. The agricultural infrastructure (is that a real term?) is such that certain areas specify in certain kinds of foods for economic reasons -- so, by eating only "locally-grown" crops, one is trying to thumb their noses at this, right? I mean, it's not feasible to do for very long, and not terribly healthy, and thus the failure of being able to do something like this is the point?

I'd hope so, because otherwise it just reeks of some kind of naive "globalization is bad, bad, baaaaad" mindset.

[jfb.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I didn't really follow that. Not sure who's thumbing whose nose at what.

Eating exclusively local food is too much for me, but I do like buying locally grown and produced food where I can. The produce is fresher and tastier, there's (generally) less environmental harm, I suspect the work conditions are better for the people , and I just kind of like the experience of buying food from the people who made it, which I do at farmer's markets.

I think the health aspects depend on where you live, and what you eat. Around here, taking the arbitrary 100-mile radius, you can get eggs, dairy, lots of meat, rice (I think), corn, some fruit and a whole lot of vegetables. So it seems like you can get a balanced diet.

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

There's a bunch of rice up around 515-ish (the 80-to-5 Sacramento bypass). I think California's probably the easiest place to do such a diet; up here in the winters things get pretty dull in the produce department: apples, pears, squash, root vegetables. Maybe some cabbages.

[jfb.livejournal.com]

It is easier in California than in Seattle, I'm sure. But even here, in the winter, fewer farmer's markets are open. The CSA we joined last year gets very root-vegetable-heavy toward late fall, and shuts down completely for the winter. (They're still growing stuff, but they can't do it reliably enough to guarantee everyone getting a full shipment each week, so they don't do subscriptions in the lean months.)

I guess you can turn to canning and freezing, but then a lot of the visceral appeal of local produce is lost.

[jfb.livejournal.com]

By the way, in case you're curious, here's the article I was talking about (http://www.metroactive.com/metro-santa-cruz/08.29.07/cover-eatlocal-0735.html). I hadn't realized I failed to link to it in the post.

[bushmiller.livejournal.com]

Right, well, no offense, but it's pretty common for Californians to come up with a plan like this which wouldn't make any sense anywhere else.

My point wasn't clearly stated, so I'll try again: Any rigid "only eat locally-produced food" plan seems to lead to one of three possible goals, as far as I can tell.

#1. Support your local economy. A great ethic, one I've got no problem with.

... but, since scant few places in the world are going to have a wide variety of foods available within, say, a 100 mile radius, then these seem more likely:

#2. Try the diet, fail, then thumb your nose at the way modern agriculture works. That is, by trying to eat from a 100-mile radius and failing (which, frankly, is what's gonna happen in rural Minnesota, not to mention West Texas or, say, Namibia), one is pointing out, I guess, that agriculture isn't distributed evenly or equally, and get people to think about how and why crops are distributed the way that they are. Again, not something I really disagree with, I'd just want that critical stance to be explicit.

#3. "California's a great place, ain't it!" This is the snide response, and reeks of the "hey, *I* live in a great place that has all this great food around me, it's TOO BAD that *you* have to live somewhere that doesn't have this?" mentality. Or, in other words, it's more snobby bullshit from the coasts, which is so, like, '98.


I think as a general maxim, supporting one's local economies and one's local agriculture is a fine enough thing to do. I think, though, we should question why anyone would want to do one of these rigid "only eat within a 100 mile radius" diets, and what doing that is really trying to accomplish. I suggest that it's a combination of the three things I listed -- first, someone wants to encourage people to support local agriculture, secondly they'll fail unless they live somewhere like, third, California! And, though there are explicit good intentions, much of this kind of thing ends up supporting a "God, I'm soooo glad I moved away from Missouri" mentality from the Internet cognoscenti.

[jfb.livejournal.com]

In general, I think rigidity is a flaw. Even the author's article doesn't hold hard and fast to the diet, although her exceptions ("I didn't want to offend someone who offered me food" and "I review restaurants for a living") aren't what mine would be ("I like chocolate") or yours ("Wisconsin agriculture doesn't support a balanced diet"). I think maybe we agree on this, that rigidity is a stunt.


I'm with you on #1. On #2, we basically agree, although I think our focus is a little different. For me the point is to raise awareness, first of all one's own, about how agriculture works, and with one's consumer choices to try to change it. I'm not thinking about failure and subsequent nose-thumbing, but this might go back to the rigidity thing.

On #3, well, yes, it's no accident that this trend started in San Francisco. But this article was written for a local audience in a local paper. It's not about how Missouri sucks; it's about how, hey, we (the paper's readers) *are* lucky enough to live in a place that can support this kind of agriculture, here's how we can be part of that support.

(Another point she raises is that, well, she has enough money to choose organic, local food, and enough time (I'd add) to cook decent meals with it. It's not just location that makes local eating a luxury.)


Finally, maybe it's just that I didn't think about this kind of thing when I lived in St. Peter, but I'd be surprised if you can't get a decent local diet in the Midwest. In Madison, for example, it looks like the Dane County Farmer's Market would at least cover all the food groups. Of course, not every town in Wisconsin or Minnesota has a Farmer's Market. Maybe it's more an urban luxury (ironically) than a coastal one?

Also, of course, that market doesn't run all year; you'd have to buy a pretty big freezer. In any case, I'm not bringing this up to be argumentative; I'm just genuinely curious about what local eating would look like in other parts of the country.

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

I'm sick and tired of you thumbing your nose at Oregon hazelnuts.

[artname.livejournal.com]

Actually, California is a pretty big winter wheat producer, largely in the Central Valley and Sacramento area. So no, not 100 miles, but maybe 150 ..

And I couldn't find any by name tgo hit you over the head with. Sorry ..

[jfb.livejournal.com]

I got the feeling from the article (http://www.metroactive.com/metro-santa-cruz/08.29.07/cover-eatlocal-0735.html) (which I forgot to link to earlier) that the author had made some rules for herself that weren't fully explained. Also, it occurred to me while reading it that it would be somewhat harder in Santa Cruz than, say, here, because half of her hundred-mile radius is ocean. From here we can get further inland, and thus take advantage of, say, those goats that you sometimes see grazing just off the freeway in Fremont. Not that I believe in taking advantage of goats.