The Local Food Network
Sticker shock
Since I started this project last week, someone brought up the idea that eating localvore is a yuppie affectation and unrealistic for the average Joe or Jane.
Guilty as charged.
Unfortunately, it's the easiest thing in the world to feed your family on junk food, fast food, over-processed food and what "Married with Children" once called "near-food products." Go into your local convenience store and think about that statement. Sadly, Skittles are not a fruit.
Local food is seldom convenient. In some cases, it's not easy to find. And it's rarely cheap to buy.
Sticker shock hit on Saturday, when $100 didn't get nearly enough groceries for the week. But the $2.50 per dozen eggs and $3 per pound baby potatoes paled compared with $15 for a 1-liter bottle of "transitional organic, cold pressed" sunflower oil from Butterworks Farm in Westfield.
There's no way we're buying that again, I said. At least until I tasted the vinaigrette that came from the mix of the oil with cider vinegar from Gingerbrook Farm in South Washington that a friend passed on. Some garlic scapes from the farmers market, honey from Ferrisburgh and a handful of herbs … wow. Honest to god, I licked off the hand blender (note to self … unplug first). While I can't see cooking with such an expensive product, for a dressing base, it's not that much more than top-quality olive oils … which are also too pricey to waste in the frying pan.
And the food is expensive for the grower as well as the buyer. The owner of Heleba Farms was digging potatoes by hand on Saturday; as anybody who's spent a few hours with a potato fork and a five-gallon bucket knows, that makes three bucks a pound seem like a good deal for spuds.
Will Heleba's heirlooms be our regular table potato once we're done the challenge? Probably not, but they'll be a regular, once-a-week kind of treat.
And at some point, given the price of diesel fuel, it's got to be cheaper to buy, say, locally grown leaf lettuces than a head from Mexico or California. According to a University of California-Davis study, in 2003, break-even for a farmer there was $8.10 per 50-pound carton of iceberg lettuce in an average field, yielding 700 cartons per acre. That's in the California warehouse. Add increases in costs since then, pay to ship that carton across the country, pay a middleman or two plus a retailer, and the break-even becomes what, $10 or $15 a carton. $25 or higher? Plus, that's using water-intensive planting methods and minimum-wage (aka illegal) labor. At some point, it's got to be cheaper to sell New England greens.
Toss in the fact that iceberg has about the same nutritional value as the box it ships in and I start to wonder how badly I want that particular flavor of dietary fiber, and what the real cost is. I have to replace the nutrients I'm missing in the lettuce somewhere. How much extra do I pay to make up the absent vitamins and how many extra calories will I take in to do so?
Most people who try to live the localvore lifestyle permanently freeze, can, dry or otherwise preserve food. They grow large vegetable gardens and trade the ensuing bounty back and forth. Some go into the woods and harvest what they eat, from mushrooms to venison. Sustainability starts with some level of self-sufficiency.
And there are public programs to put local food on the tables of low-income families.
Sue Hommel, a health outreach specialist in Rutland, runs a program through WIC (Women, Infants, Children) to help mothers with young children buy nutritious, local food. On Tuesday, Hommel helped hand out $30 coupons for fruits and vegetables, redeemable at Vermont farmers markets, to 100 families. Throughout the summer, she'll hand out $12,000 in coupons, and there are 12 such programs across the state, run by the Department of Health. Families redeem about three-quarters of the coupons.
Part of the program includes teaching quick, easy, healthy recipes, an integral element in our world of Kwik-Heet pouches and E-Z-Fix meals-in-a-box.
WIC is far from the only program. One of the oldest in the state is Food Works at Two Rivers Center in Montpelier, celebrating its 20th anniversary. The nonprofit's administrative director, Martin Kemple, says the popularity of local foods is growing.
Farmers markets, co-ops, farm stands and similar retail outlets are on the rise. Many restaurants take advantage of home-grown foods, although they generally don't go so far as to be considered "localvore." As demand increases, market gardening becomes a more reliable form of agriculture and mixed farms grow up, lowering prices.
Kemple says Food Works has a four-pronged approach: growing, cooking, serving and preserving.
Growing, in terms of supporting community gardens; cooking and serving through educational programs primarily aimed at institutional kitchens such as schools, hospitals, elder centers and the like; and preserving through teaching people to safely put up food. Yesterday, they were teaching residents of a Burlington housing project to make strawberries into strawberry jam.
They are also part of a statewide program to grow food for food banks and to educate schools how and where to buy local produce.
Jeezum, even Jim Douglas put out a public service announcement asking Vermonters to shop local for the feast on the Fourth of July, saying that eating 10 percent local food would add $100 million annually to Vermont's agricultural economy.
Challenge update
Breakfast: Homemade maple scones, coffee and the standby treat, strawberries and yogurt. The cider (unpasteurized, with a sell-by date of this Friday) is halfway to hard cider, which, while not a bad thing, isn't exactly breakfast food. After six localvore meals, two days without juice boxes or Elmo-brand snack cookies and nary a peep of protest, Callum, 3, finally teared up this morning, asking in a voice worthy of Cindy Lou Who: "Daddy, Mommy said to ask you if raisins are localvore." As he won't be using the coffee or red wine mulligans, I was happy to let him have a raisin mulligan instead. I suspect he'll use a chocolate ice cream mulligan before we're through.
Lunch: Leftovers. Some ground turkey that didn't fit into Monday's Monster Pie, a green salad topped with fresh asparagus from a friend's garden and that vinaigrette. Yum.
Dinner: Whatever comes out of the farm stand this afternoon. It's Wednesday and in our preservative-free world, we need to shop again.
Guilty as charged.
Unfortunately, it's the easiest thing in the world to feed your family on junk food, fast food, over-processed food and what "Married with Children" once called "near-food products." Go into your local convenience store and think about that statement. Sadly, Skittles are not a fruit.
Local food is seldom convenient. In some cases, it's not easy to find. And it's rarely cheap to buy.
Sticker shock hit on Saturday, when $100 didn't get nearly enough groceries for the week. But the $2.50 per dozen eggs and $3 per pound baby potatoes paled compared with $15 for a 1-liter bottle of "transitional organic, cold pressed" sunflower oil from Butterworks Farm in Westfield.
There's no way we're buying that again, I said. At least until I tasted the vinaigrette that came from the mix of the oil with cider vinegar from Gingerbrook Farm in South Washington that a friend passed on. Some garlic scapes from the farmers market, honey from Ferrisburgh and a handful of herbs … wow. Honest to god, I licked off the hand blender (note to self … unplug first). While I can't see cooking with such an expensive product, for a dressing base, it's not that much more than top-quality olive oils … which are also too pricey to waste in the frying pan.
And the food is expensive for the grower as well as the buyer. The owner of Heleba Farms was digging potatoes by hand on Saturday; as anybody who's spent a few hours with a potato fork and a five-gallon bucket knows, that makes three bucks a pound seem like a good deal for spuds.
Will Heleba's heirlooms be our regular table potato once we're done the challenge? Probably not, but they'll be a regular, once-a-week kind of treat.
And at some point, given the price of diesel fuel, it's got to be cheaper to buy, say, locally grown leaf lettuces than a head from Mexico or California. According to a University of California-Davis study, in 2003, break-even for a farmer there was $8.10 per 50-pound carton of iceberg lettuce in an average field, yielding 700 cartons per acre. That's in the California warehouse. Add increases in costs since then, pay to ship that carton across the country, pay a middleman or two plus a retailer, and the break-even becomes what, $10 or $15 a carton. $25 or higher? Plus, that's using water-intensive planting methods and minimum-wage (aka illegal) labor. At some point, it's got to be cheaper to sell New England greens.
Toss in the fact that iceberg has about the same nutritional value as the box it ships in and I start to wonder how badly I want that particular flavor of dietary fiber, and what the real cost is. I have to replace the nutrients I'm missing in the lettuce somewhere. How much extra do I pay to make up the absent vitamins and how many extra calories will I take in to do so?
Most people who try to live the localvore lifestyle permanently freeze, can, dry or otherwise preserve food. They grow large vegetable gardens and trade the ensuing bounty back and forth. Some go into the woods and harvest what they eat, from mushrooms to venison. Sustainability starts with some level of self-sufficiency.
And there are public programs to put local food on the tables of low-income families.
Sue Hommel, a health outreach specialist in Rutland, runs a program through WIC (Women, Infants, Children) to help mothers with young children buy nutritious, local food. On Tuesday, Hommel helped hand out $30 coupons for fruits and vegetables, redeemable at Vermont farmers markets, to 100 families. Throughout the summer, she'll hand out $12,000 in coupons, and there are 12 such programs across the state, run by the Department of Health. Families redeem about three-quarters of the coupons.
Part of the program includes teaching quick, easy, healthy recipes, an integral element in our world of Kwik-Heet pouches and E-Z-Fix meals-in-a-box.
WIC is far from the only program. One of the oldest in the state is Food Works at Two Rivers Center in Montpelier, celebrating its 20th anniversary. The nonprofit's administrative director, Martin Kemple, says the popularity of local foods is growing.
Farmers markets, co-ops, farm stands and similar retail outlets are on the rise. Many restaurants take advantage of home-grown foods, although they generally don't go so far as to be considered "localvore." As demand increases, market gardening becomes a more reliable form of agriculture and mixed farms grow up, lowering prices.
Kemple says Food Works has a four-pronged approach: growing, cooking, serving and preserving.
Growing, in terms of supporting community gardens; cooking and serving through educational programs primarily aimed at institutional kitchens such as schools, hospitals, elder centers and the like; and preserving through teaching people to safely put up food. Yesterday, they were teaching residents of a Burlington housing project to make strawberries into strawberry jam.
They are also part of a statewide program to grow food for food banks and to educate schools how and where to buy local produce.
Jeezum, even Jim Douglas put out a public service announcement asking Vermonters to shop local for the feast on the Fourth of July, saying that eating 10 percent local food would add $100 million annually to Vermont's agricultural economy.
Challenge update
Breakfast: Homemade maple scones, coffee and the standby treat, strawberries and yogurt. The cider (unpasteurized, with a sell-by date of this Friday) is halfway to hard cider, which, while not a bad thing, isn't exactly breakfast food. After six localvore meals, two days without juice boxes or Elmo-brand snack cookies and nary a peep of protest, Callum, 3, finally teared up this morning, asking in a voice worthy of Cindy Lou Who: "Daddy, Mommy said to ask you if raisins are localvore." As he won't be using the coffee or red wine mulligans, I was happy to let him have a raisin mulligan instead. I suspect he'll use a chocolate ice cream mulligan before we're through.
Lunch: Leftovers. Some ground turkey that didn't fit into Monday's Monster Pie, a green salad topped with fresh asparagus from a friend's garden and that vinaigrette. Yum.
Dinner: Whatever comes out of the farm stand this afternoon. It's Wednesday and in our preservative-free world, we need to shop again.
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