Friday: First, some ground rules about 'local' food

This will be my second year doing the Eat Local Challenge. Last year it was an educational and gratifying experience -- and much harder than I expected! I learned a lot, and there are a few things I’m going to do differently this year as a result, but at the same time I’ve got some extra challenges of my own built into the week that should keep it -- well -- challenging.

I became interested in doing this for several reasons. The first one is that I love to cook. I look at this as an opportunity to explore new ingredients, new sources and new recipes. I’m a firm believer that local, organic foods taste better, and I enjoy finding new places to get fresh, good-quality ingredients. Secondly, I'm concerned about the impact that all the trucking and flying around of foods has on the environment when there are so many delicious things growing right here. I also want to limit the pesticides my family consumes, and I'm not sold at all on the idea of genetically altered frankenfoods. Eating local means you know where it came from. Lastly, like many families, ours is concerned with rising costs. I don’t mind paying a bit more for organic, because I find that choosing local, in-season ingredients and preparing them myself is generally more economical than purchasing foods that are preserved, processed or out of season. This challenge gives me the opportunity to look at my grocery bill to see how local-only eating affects my food budget.

Here we are on the eve of the challenge and I can’t wait to get started. The first step is to establish some parameters. I’ll start with the idea that everything I provide for my family to eat has to have been grown, raised, produced, packaged or whatever within 100 miles of my home in Medford. I tend to be something of a purist about things like this; I wouldn’t forgive myself easily if I wimped out. So I’d better make any special allowances at the beginning. For starters I know I am going to need coffee. Last year I virtuously swore off that exotic bean for the week, with the result that on Day 3 I awoke with a splitting headache that stayed with me the rest of the week. So this year I will allow myself an organic, shade-grown, fair-trade cup of morning coffee.

Also, because I don’t want to carry the hair-shirt thing too far (this is supposed to be a fun and tasty experiment, after all), I am going to claim what I’ve heard called the “Marco Polo exception”: powdered spices traded by the ancients are allowed. Bought in bulk and used in small quantities, they do very little harm and add a lot of flavor. Salt is included here. Sunset Magazine recently published an in-depth account of their One-Block Feast that included instructions for homemade salt. You can check it out at http://www.sunset.com/sunset/i/misc/pdfs/OneBlock_Salt.pdf Their conclusion: “unless you live right on the shore of a verifiably pristine sea, with sunny clear skies for evaporating, it’s totally impractical and possibly risky to make your own salt.” Wars have been waged over the stuff; but fortunately there is a jar of nice organic sea salt right in my own cupboard, and I plan to use it.

It’s my habit to bake bread every day, and I have searched with no success for local flour. Locally ground yes, but grown here, no. Calls to Bob’s Red Mill and Butte Creek Mill both yielded the information that the wheat they grind is grown in Montana -– too far to qualify as “local.” The knowledgeable folks at both operations explained that Montana flour has a higher protein content, making it a more nutritious choice. My family will desert me if they don’t have bread, so I will make another exception here for Northwest grown flour and also for yeast. I can’t decide what to do about sugar -– to start with I think I will avoid it and then see how things go as the week progresses. I have lots of company coming this week and certainly there will be many more dessert options if I allow sugar. We’ll have to see.

Then there is that big problem of dependence on foreign oil -- olive oil, that is. My normal cooking habits involve quite a lot of the stuff. I could probably manage with butter, but my younger son is allergic to all cow’s milk products and I’m not too keen on making two versions of everything. Last year I searched for a local oil, finally securing one produced in the Napa Valley -- still almost 300 miles away. I used it, but to be honest it tasted more like WD-40 than the spicy, fruity Argentine variety I normally buy in bulk at the Ashland Food Co-op. Our oldest son is visiting this weekend from California and he brought me a present of two bottles of olive oil grown and pressed near where he lives –- a quick taste test tells me there is hope! It’s from outside our local area, but it’s in his, so I’ll just be stretching the rules a little. To make salad more interesting, I’ll also add vinegar to the list. I found instructions for making vinegar on the Sunset Web site I mentioned earlier, but I would have had to start making it a long time ago to be able to use it this week.

So, with the exception of coffee, spices, flour, yeast, olive oil, vinegar and (maybe) sugar, everything has to come from within a 100-mile radius of my home in Medford. Tomorrow is Day 1 -- I’ll let you know how I do!