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

[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.