TGF: Think Globally, Eat Locally

Dear Readers, I did it. Yesterday, I ate nothing that wasn't grown and processed and sold within 150 miles of my home. And this was even less easy than one might suppose, considering I am in the full grip of a bad summer cold--the kind where you can walk outside in a sweatshirt and pants with the sun blazing overhead and complain of a chill.

On the plus side, the food was the best part of my day. I had:

1. scrambled eggs with milk and cheese
2. wild blueberry muffins (pictured above)
3. tomato-and-cheese sandwich with basil and oregano on cheddar nugget bread made with spelt flour
4. steaks
5. potatoes
6. peas
7. vanilla ice cream--this might have been cheating, but I am sick.

And I never got around to the peach in my lunch bag.

When I first committed to spending 24 hours eating nothing that wasn't grown locally, I envisioned a full day of berries and nuts and maybe some beans--very healthy, not too appetizing, and boring. I could have done that, too, and it would have been easier; but I wanted to prove that local eating could in fact be pleasurable and something one might feasibly do on a regular basis, not as a novelty prank on a blog. So it took longer, but it was a lot more fun and the food was much, much better.

Here's how I did:

Not bad, eh?

Once I found the flour--that's the Kitchener lemon-- a whole world of new possibilities opened up. Mind you, they opened up only in the imagination, because actually finding the flour turned out to be tricky. I knew the company existed, I knew they sourced their grains locally and milled them locally, I knew they were supposed to be available in health food stores. They also can be purchased on WOW organics, but they have a minimum $60 order policy, and I didn't want to buy $60 worth of flour only to find out it sucks. The yellow pages came to my rescue and directed me to a health food shop across the street from the Loblaws, and there I found it--but only spelt. 'What the hell?' I thought. 'How different can it be? The packaging says it makes a good all-purpose flour.' And does packaging ever lie?

The flour when bought in a store is very pricey--about $7 for a small bag--on the other hand, I saved quite a bit on the steaks (a good roast for about $25 or $30, sliced into eight) and the rest of it was, if not as cheap as the supermarket, pretty close. Anyway. I now had flour and wild blueberries. 'Muffins. Can I make muffins? Is there a muffin recipe that uses only local ingredients? Maybe I can find a pioneer cookbook online, I'll bet that would be local.'

I did find an online searchable pioneer cookbook, but decided I wasn't quite brave enough to try recipes like, "One pint milk, two eggs, half cupful butter, half cupful yeast, one cupful sugar, a little salt. Warm the milk and in it let the butter melt, add to these the well-beaten eggs, salt, yeast, sufficient flour to make a stiff batter. Let rise over night, in the morning add the sugar. Work well and make into thin round cakes, let rise for four hours, cover with egg and sprinkle over them a little sugar. Bake in a quick oven, about twenty minutes." Bake in a quick oven. Hmmm.

So a modern cookbook it was, but what to do about ingredients such as sugar and cooking oil? Could I substitute maple sugar? According to the internet--indeed I can! And maybe I could pretend that melted butter is cooking oil? Why not? Is there any local butter? Back to the internet: Not exactly, unless you define "local" as "within 150-200 miles." OK, close enough. Now I had ingredients for wild blueberry muffins.

The red apple outside of the hundred-mile circle is the dairy marker: There are two cooperatives that purchase milk from dairy farms in eastern ontario and make them into butter, milk, cheese etc. for sale in the Greater Toronto Area (Ontarbio, marketed as Organic Meadow, and Gay Lea). I'm still a bit squeamish on these ones; it doesn't really seem in the spirit of things to be buying milk and milk products from cows that I can't meet and through such a highly industrialized processing and marketing framework; but how interested am I in purchasing unpasteurized milk products? At the moment, not very. There are also oodles of cheese factories in that area of the province (brand names include Ivanhoe, Wilton, Black River, Mapledale and Forfar, and possibly Baldersons).

The local apple--the one on top of the read balloon--is Forsythe Family Farms, and it was my source for the peas, steaks, potatoes, tomatoes, wild blueberries, eggs, and peaches. The potatoes, tomatoes, wild blueberries and peaches came from other farms in the area or in the Niagara Region (the apple near St. Catharines). We also bought the ice cream at Forsythe's--the Kawarthas, the bunch of green grapes a bit to the north. The two cherries near the edge of the circle represent the maple sugar, from Formosa.

(The basil and oregano came from my garden.)

Baking with spelt flour was a bit more adventurous than anticipated. Whether it was the fault of the recipes or the flour I can't say, since both recipes were new to me, but especially in the case of the bread I had to use more flour than the recipe called for (six cups instead of four). That said, it turned out very well.

In both cases maple sugar did the trick nicely; the butter substituted well for the cooking oil; and the final products were good. And so was the rest of it: the scrambled eggs with milk and cheese; the sandwiches; the dinner of steaks, potatoes and peas. Yummy. (I don't need to tell you that the ice cream was good too, do I? I didn't think so.)

If I were to write everything I'd learned to prepare for that one-day food adventure, it would take a book, so I won't. I probably will write a few more posts over the next little while covering some of it--like what's involved in finding local foods, some tools and tricks for hunting them down, how the economics shook out, recipes and substitutions for those common yet not-local ingredients like sugar, the difference between organic and sustainable, the place of trade in food economies, a big list of sources for anyone in S Ont who's interested, and so on. But before I tie this one off:

Confessions: Besides the Diet Coke, I waved my magic wand over the baking powder and yeast and declared them local as well. According to the pioneer cookbook it is in fact possible to grow your own yeast (!), but that would only make sense if one was going to bake bread every week. Which they did. But I can't see myself doing that. And I still don't have a clue where baking powder comes from. I told myself that even the pioneers, those intrepid adventurers who had no choice but to eat locally, did import some food products. People have been trading food products sustainably for thousands of years; but there's a big difference between trading small quantities of spices and leavenings back and forth, vs. being unable to purchase Ontario strawberries in a major Canadian grocery chain in the middle of July. Anyway, this is one of those subjects that ought to be a post on its own, so I'll leave it there.

The most pleasant discovery was simply that I ate well. There was a sacrifice of time involved, in finding and preparing the food, but at no point did I feel that the food itself was substandard or not something I would choose to eat. Even finding it and preparing it was fun. Going to the farm was fun. Finding new stores was fun. And I like to bake, so the baking was fun too. It was not a hardship.

I don't think I will ever eat solely locally as a permanent lifestyle, but I definitely see myself eating locally far more often. The options are more varied than I had supposed and not as expensive as I'd feared. Finding them was the hard part, and that's done.

Posted by Andrea at July 20, 2006 8:22 AM under The Green Family

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