Eating Locally: Harder Than You Think?
I got a press release from the Sac Co-op recently about an Eat Local Challenge that they're sponsoring this month. They were challenging me to belly up to local food. Easy, I thought. Who has a whole backyard of fruit trees and veggies? Who shops at the Co-op and farmer's markets and knows local pork purveyors by name? How hard could it be? Ha!
I dutifully printed out their Eat Local scorecard and list of local food products and started my personal challenge. Turns out I don't eat as locally as I thought. Hmph. Of course, this was already a bit doomed at the beginning by the fact that I hadn't gone shopping recently, in my quest to use up those bits of grains and random packages of curry mix and whatnot. And being the omnivore that I am, I seem to have a lot of non-local foodstuffs in my pantry. Oh yeah, and I shop at Trader Joe's a lot to save money, but none of their store brand items are labeled with point of origin...so it makes it a bit difficult to include them.
Now the challenge is to eat 80 percent of your meals from local sources (whether it's the actual ingredients or locally made), so you would think that wouldn't be too hard, right? And the "local" part includes anything within 100 miles. For us, that means practically anything you could want--especially if you throw in the locally made allowance (for things like chocolate!). But so far, I'm not meeting that 80 percent goal. Must get more serious about this.
Some of the things that I have managed to eat from local sources include an abundance of peaches from our backyard tree (see peach pie above), a homegrown pumpkin that I turned into a Nepalese curry, and some La Clarine goat cheese that I got when I visited their farm recently. However, the cereal, rice, and yogurt that I had on hand were not local but needed to get used up. So today I'm going shopping for replacements with local roots. I did buy some Lundberg rice recently, which is pure California. That's an easy one, with over 500,000 acres of rice paddies in the Sacramento area. Unfortunately, the chicken I bought at the Co-op that I thought was from Marin was in fact from Colorado. Oops! So I'm reading labels a lot more, and not just for the fat and sodium content.
The Sac Co-op will be holding a Local Challenge Tasting Fair on Saturday, August 16, from 1 to 4 p.m. Go and try some products that you might not have thought to buy before. They've got a really helpful Local Products List on their Web site, including the distances from Sacramento. You can also download their scorecard and then turn it in at the end of the month to be entered in a drawing for a basket of locally grown and produced products. Don't forget about other sources for local yummies though, like the farmer's markets (including bread, olive oil, and nuts), Taylor's Market, Ginger Elizabeth Chocolates, local breweries like Rubicon and Hoppy Brewing Company, local wineries like Rail Bridge Cellars, and local cheeses like La Clarine. My husband even found some locally made items at Costco, including Amy's chili, which is made in Petaluma, and bread from the Truckee Sourdough Company. So don't rule out your favorite store, just be sure to read the labels and know your geography if you want to join in the challenge! It might be easier than you think...or harder.
Comments
About time the Coop caught on, Taylor's has been doing this for months....
Posted by: David Greco | September 4, 2008 4:18 AM