Monday: Altered approach to meal-planning makes local eating more successful

So to wrap this whole thing up, what are my thoughts and plans at the end of these 10 days?

For starters, I’m very much looking forward to having a bit of chocolate next week, but I’ll look for a local manufacturer. In the longer term, I know I have to have lemons, but I will make an extra effort to barter with traveling friends and relatives who can bring them from warmer climates, and I will continue to bring back boxfuls myself from our own trips south (the juice freezes well). We will plant more tomatoes next year so I have enough frozen to last all year. We will plant a garden for winter, and put up a cold-frame to extend the season on some of our summer vegetables.

Argentine olive oil is still worth it, and I will continue to buy in bulk instead of wasteful glass bottles. I’ll still buy frozen phyllo dough. I’ll still buy fish, too (we can only rely so much on the generosity of friends, and we haven’t the inclination to learn to fish for ourselves), but we’ll stick to Northwest varieties. In the winter when our local fresh fruit is over and I tire of Washington apples, I will probably buy some bananas because my family loves them. And then there is the fact that soy and fish sauce, sesame oil, rice and rice noodles, none of them local, open up a whole continent of Asian flavors that I am not willing to forgo forever.

There are other things I didn’t miss over the course of these 10 days, grown or manufactured outside our region, that I will probably realize I am unwilling to go without. You can be sure, however, I will look at each one carefully before I allow it back into my pantry.
On the other hand, I have a great new local flour source (news flash: white, unbleached Black Ranch flour is available in bulk at Ashland Food Co-op). Maybe I’ll get a sourdough starter going, and then I won’t even have to buy yeast to make entirely local bread.

I will definitely start to make my own cheese, as soon as I find a local milk source for non-homogenized cow and goat milk, although I will still want to buy foreign Parmesan and manchego. I’ll try out the microwave method for making my own yogurt that my son learned from an Indian friend. I now have sources for local beef and lamb, and no reason to get meat from farther away than Jacksonville. We fully intend to start raising our own chickens for eggs.

I may never be a total locavore, or completely self-sustaining here on my own little quarter acre, but I’m getting a little closer each year. I’ve made a lot of changes this week, and as they say change is hard; it takes a lot of extra time and work at first. But awkward ways soon become new habits and streamlined routines. It gets easier, just like making my own bread each day has gotten so much easier since I started a year ago that now I hardly think about it.

I hope the choices I make to buy non-local will be deliberate ones. Though it might be rationalization in part, I believe there are sometimes legitimate reasons for eating outside the locavore boundary. Supporting local businesses is a very big one: The local pasta makers, bakers, and other specialty food manufacturers need local customers.


Also, sometimes purchasing foreign products can do a social good; I am reminded of a documentary film I saw last year, about a small skin-care products company that helped support a collective of African women growing the raw ingredients for their soaps and lotions. I am sure the same principle applies to some food products, but I need to do a little research to choose the right companies to support.

Getting pretty theoretical here. But it is clear to me that the dollars I spend have an effect in other arenas besides the transportation/fossil fuel problem addressed by food miles. As others have also pointed out, you sometimes have to weigh a local, big-agriculture choice against a more distant, sustainable one and consider which option does the least harm (or which provides the greatest benefit).


At the personal level, this week has been a real success for me. My family is happy with many of the new recipes we tried. The slow-roasted tomatoes, the chimichurri and the homemade feta and ricotta are keepers for sure, and we’ll be seeing a lot more of those around here. I know where to get many more local organic ingredients, too.

I was not so good at figuring the relative expense of local eating since we had so many extra people coming and going from our household this week. I think I probably did spend more than normal; it costs more to produce organic foods on a small scale, even if the transportation cost is less. Was it worth it? Absolutely yes.


I think the biggest lesson I learned is that to be successful at local eating, I have to make a shift in my meal-planning thinking. Instead of dreaming up what I should like for dinner and then going out to find the ingredients, the best approach is to begin with fresh seasonal ingredients and proceed from there. It sounds simple and obvious, but it’s a pretty major shift in how I usually do things. I am confident I can adjust.