Stay Local

Pregnant women and stressed out grad students think about food. A LOT. While I’m eating breakfast I am thinking about lunch. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about food. I eat constantly when on conference calls or reading or doing homework. One of my favorite things

boxes of organic heirlooms at the local farmer's market.

in the world is a fresh, heirloom tomato with some super sharp  cheddar cheese- VT cheddar if you please. This combination was one of the first food items I sought as soon as my boots hit US soil again this summer and I haven’t stopped yet. There are tomatoes in Okinawa, they just aren’t very good, not the kind of tomato you can eat like an apple, letting the amazingly sweet juices run down your chin in full summer glory.

I was first introduced to heirloom veges about 6 years ago and it’s been a love affair ever since. What they have really come to represent to me is a movement back to variety in the foods we grow and a push to eat more local items. Just to be clear here: I don’t mean jam made locally from fruit grown in British Columbia. I mean our-farm-is-two-miles-down-the-road kind of local. Being pregers has kicked this eating local thing into overdrive for me, too (no, I’m not perfect in my food choices. I love, and I mean LOVE, that processed cheese food garbage in a can).

In San Diego there has been an explosion of Farmer’s Markets since I was here last that make this much easier and accessible to people of all walks of life. We have found our local favorite in Encinitas and have been trying to go every week. They have all kinds of organic produce, free range eggs

Eggs from my sister's organic farm.

(if you haven’t ever tried them, do a side-by-side comparison with the normal grocery store eggs you buy. I think you’ll be surprised), the most amazing organic, local goat cheese I’ve ever had and even local olives. A quick Google search should show you what’s close to you. There seems to be an emergence of year-round Farmer’s Markets popping up, too.

A great publication my little sister- who is an organic farmer, by the way, and a grown woman but still my little sister, more on her next week- introduced me to is the Edible series. They have issues for a ton of cities and regions across the US. I’ve been checking out the Edible San Diego publication, naturally, but I recommend you take a look for

where ever you’re at. They talk about local food sources and interview local vendors, have great photos and there is an on-line version if you either can’t find a copy or want to save paper.

If you really want to jump in and go hard core on eating locally there is a fantastic book by one of my favorite authors, Barbara Kingsolver, which I recommend to everyone I know, called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. It is a memoir of Ms. Kingsolver’s family’s journey through a year-long commitment to eat only locally grown food. They did allow themselves a few “cheat” foods like coffee but made a commitment to ensure those items were sustainably and fairly farmed. Their website even gives a guide to vegetable landscaping (my fantastic grandfather has been doing it for more than 50 years), something that is becoming more and more popular as oil prices go up and it costs more to get our food from New Zealand and other far off places to our grocery stores.

The concept is really intriguing and the more I got into it the more I realized just how far our food has to travel to get to us these days. It has really highlighted just how divorced we have all become from where our food comes from. As a country girl myself I have personally seen animals slaughtered (sorry if that makes you queasy but your steak did wander around on four legs at one point) and am intimately familiar with what it takes to grow lettuce and keep it from the bunnies. But after I moved to a city lifestyle 15 years ago I forgot. In addition to the fact that the taste of fresh picked food beans little resemblance to the frozen (or fresh) grocery variety, the sooner you eat them after they’re picked the more nutritious they are. Farmers markets offer great varieties you may not have seen before and are fresher than just about anything you can get at most large grocery store chains.

When I talk to non-foodies about eating organic the biggest complaint I hear is how much more expensive it is (as an unemployed grad student I am acutely aware of prices these days). But when you consider the pesticides you aren’t putting into your body and that the food is more nutritious isn’t that investment in your health worth it? Then consider the rising cost of health care. What’s a little more health insurance up front in the form of disease prevention worth? If we were currently paying the real price of food from the big, SUBSIDIZED farms (where most of our food comes from) people might not complain so much. In fact, they might insist the bigger farms get in on preserving their farm land, water and our health. I don’t want to bag on farmers: my little sister is one. However, consumers demanding better food may help push larger farmers to innovate and adopt better land management options.

Personally, I sleep better at night eating chicken once a week instead of three, knowing that the chicken I did eat roamed around eating bugs and was raised by people paid a fair wage (I want

to add that happy animals have less adrenaline in their systems when slaughtered and taste infinitely better. One bite of my sister’s lamb was enough to convince me!). If you’ve never had an heirloom tomato or organic, free range meat, I promise you it’s worth a little extra money. If you want to grow your own (yes, I have heard it snowed for 18 hours in CT the other day) you can get more information on where to get fantastic, heirloom variety seeds and keep the biodiversity in our gardens high at the Seed Savers Exchange, a non-profit dedicated to just that.

 As always, the above photos are copywrited. Please don't use them without my permission.