Music and Cats

Four years ago, I picked up a copy of Gary Paul Nabhan’s Coming Home to Eat at our neighborhood bookstore. In this book, subtitled The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, Nabhan wrote about his year of eating within his foodshed, which he defined for purposes of his experiment as “a 250-mile loop around [his] home.” Nabhan wrote:

I want to escape the trap that I, like most Americans, have fallen into the last four decades: obtaining nine-tenths of our food from nonlocal sources, with shippers, processors, packagers, retailers, and advertisers gaining three times more income from each dollar of food purchased than do farmers, fishermen, and ranchers. I want to reduce the distance that my food travels before it reaches my mouth and my mind…

When I read Nabhan’s book, Paul and I had been living in Seattle for a couple of years. We were shopping at our local farmers markets, and had bought a share in a winter CSA. I was thinking about eating more locally, and found Nabhan’s approach appealing , but it seemed to me too difficult, too time-consuming, too restrictive…

Fast forward four years (we’ll go back and look at some of that later), and I’ve changed my mind - enough so that I’m about to embark on a short-term experiment in coming home to eat. Tomorrow is the beginning of the month-long Eat Local Challenge 2006, brainchild of Jennifer at Life Begins at 30 and the Bay-Area-based Locavores. (What’s a locavore? Think carnivore, omnivore, herbivore…) The Locavore guidelines for eating well are as follows:

If not LOCALLY PRODUCED, then Organic.
If not ORGANIC, then Family Farm.
If not FAMILY FARM, then Local Business.
If not a LOCAL BUSINESS, then Terroir, which means ‘taste of the Earth’.

This approach to selecting the foods that I eat appeals to me tremendously. How, then, to fashion these guidelines into a personal plan for eating locally? Jen asked participants in the Eat Local Challenge to answer the following questions:

1. What’s your definition of local for this challenge?

My working definition of local is: fresh produce grown within 100 miles of my home; dairy, eggs, fish, and meat produced (raised/laid/caught) within 200 miles of my home; grains and beans grown in the Northwest: Washington, Oregon and Idaho.

2. What exemptions will you claim?

I will drink coffee, but will buy locally roasted beans. I may not give up chocolate entirely, but I will buy from small West Coast producers. I will use non-local spices, but will buy them in bulk to reduce packaging. I will buy lemons and olive oil from California.

I have some business lunches in the next month; I will attempt to eat foods that could be grown or produced in this area, even if the actual food I’m eating is not.

3. What is your personal goal for the month?

My goal is that at least 75% of my diet for this month be locally grown foods, and that the remaining 25% be organic, family farmed and/or locally produced. My larger goal is to learn more about food production in my foodshed.

Of course I’ll be letting you know how it goes. What fun would it be to keep this all to myself?

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