One of my goals at the beginning of the year was to look into eating more locally grown food. I was reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and was inspired to at least look into it a bit.
A big revelation I've had in thinking about our food and where it comes from and what it's treated with and whatnot is: It does not have to be all or nothing. I can drink my tea with tea leaves from who knows where while eating locally laid eggs and bacon from nearby pigs and feel fine about it. And I do. The aspect I like about eating locally is the reduction in fuel usage and emissions. I like the idea of using a small amount of gas to transport lettuce to my table from northern New York, compared to using a large amount of gas to transport it from California. And so, if the two options are presented and reasonable, I'll choose the local-er one.
This year our neighborhood began a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project. This means on Saturday mornings Dave and Andrew go our church (where the food happens to be dropped off) and collect the farmer's harvest. Each week we get different vegetables according to what is ready for us to eat. This past week we received, among other things, garlic scapes. Have you heard of those? Me neither. But they taste like an onion/scallion/garlic something so I added them, instead of chives, to this Potato Chive, um, Potato Garlic Scape Bread.
Another way I have been supporting the local folk is by buying my milk, eggs and apple juice from local dairy farms and orchards. This one was easy. The company that I order my groceries from (called Fresh Direct) has a 'local' section on their website. So, it's not a huge lifestyle change or anything (and honestly, I have enough lifestyle changes going on right now without adding rooftop gardening to my, well, roof), but these are little changes that I like, that make sense and help foster that feeling that I am a rockstar.
And just for balance, I also made strawberry cream cheese coffee cake and I have no idea where the strawberries were grown or the cream cheese made.
But, I know it tastes pretty good.
4 comments:
Our veggie people had garlic scapes last week! Guess we're a little ahead of you. I feel like this is the worst part about moving. It seems to take awhile to find all these good little food sources but once you've gotten used to them you want to keep them. I'm panicking about going a whole month without any raw milk :)
"Be a local hero. Buy locally grown." That's the big slogan around here in Western Mass. I love it! It feels so good, tastes so good, and gets addicting!
I love this post!
Also- you can use garlic scapes any way you'd use garlic. I also just saw a recipe for garlic scape pesto. Atticus likes to pretend they're green worms. (-:
Robyn,
I am so in awe of you - I don't know how you do everything that you do. Can I get your recipes for scones & strawberry cream cheese coffee cake?
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