One Local Summer (so far)

Guess what? Just after I thought we could put the thermometer away for a little while, poor Noodle came down with this. Thankfully, he seems to be on the mend and none of us have caught it so far.

{ Our first CSA share - avec totally non-local bananas! }

So I haven't had a chance yet to mention that...gulp...I'm doing One Local Summer, an international challenge hosted by Farm to Philly that asks participants to make and share one local meal per week.

Now, I am an unlikely candidate for this type of challenge for several reasons. For one, I've never done anything like this before - this is also my first year buying a share in a CSA farm - so I have a feeling I'm not going to be inspiring anyone with the meals I come up with. Instead, I'm doing all the taking, ripping off fabulous ideas from the other participants in my region.

I'm also a bit of a skeptic about local eating, and not only because I am addicted to the lovely beans of the cocoa and coffee plants. I'm also skeptical about it from the environmental and social perspectives. Peter Singer has said it a lot better than me, so I'll let him to do the talking on this one.

If you don't know who Peter Singer is, he is worth getting to know - I would consider him one of the most interesting and relevant philosophers of our time. I can pretty much guarantee, no matter what your general outlook on life, that his views will (and should) offend your sensibilities. He is a radical utilitarian who has argued, for example, that given a choice between saving your one child or a raft full of people from drowning, the ethically correct choice would be the raft full of people. Don't write him off yet, though. He is a fascinating guy. Most of his propositions take place in the realm of academic abstraction, and at the heart of it, he is in the business of trying to figure out what the best way is to do the least harm to all living things. I promise he will provoke you to justify your views to yourself.

And here is what he has said about the locovore movement:

You have to ask yourself what’s particularly good about being local. People say, “Well, I want to support my local economy.” But if you’re living in a prosperous part of the United States, what’s really ethical about supporting the economy around you rather than, say, buying fairly traded produce from Bangladesh, where you might be supporting smaller, poorer farmers who need a market for their goods? So I think that just in terms of supporting your local economy, I’d say no, you should support the economy where your dollars are needed most. But then people will say, “Yes, but there’s all the fossil fuel used in shipping it over from Bangladesh or wherever.” But people often don’t realize that if you’re shipping something like rice by sea, the fuel costs are extremely low. Shipping is a very efficient way of transporting. It may be that if you’re buying rice in California, the rice from Bangladesh has used less fossil fuel than California rice, even counting what it takes to get there. We also found that when we looked at tomatoes produced in New Jersey early in the season by being grown on heat, when you calculate the amount of oil that goes into heating the greenhouses, it turns out that you could have trucked them up from Florida with a similar amount of oil. If people are prepared to eat locally and seasonally, then they probably do pretty well in terms of environmental impact. But there’s not many people who live in the northern states of the U.S. who will say, "I’m not going to have any tomatoes between November and July." So I think there’s a certain amount of double talk about local food that’s just too rosy.

-- From an interview in Mother Jones Magazine, 3 May 2006 [here]

So what am I doing, doing OLS?

I wanted to do it for several reasons, including challenging my assumptions and getting creative with my CSA share. Foremost among them, though, is the fact that I am a fan of supporting people making positive strives within the community I am currently living in. I often get overwhelmed by the amount of good that sorely needs doing in what seems like every corner of the globe. In those moments I remind myself that helping one's neighbors is always a good place to start. How can I expect to find organic foods on the grocery store shelf if I don't support the small organic growers three miles from my home?

In fact, I've learned so much since joining this effort it's sort of blowing my mind. I do kind of live under a rock when it comes to pop culture - as in, I had no idea that little Shiloh of the Branjelina clan was, in fact, a girl. (What? The Hebrew word "Shiloh" is a proper noun that is invariably masculine when referring to a person.) On the other hand, the term 'locovore' is old news to me, so I didn't really think I was going to have Shiloh-is-a-girl level revelations there. I was wrong. I really had been thinking of local eating as seasonal eating. When it comes to assembling an actual meal from things grown within 100 miles of here, well, it is hard.

{ Representing Week 2 & 3 }

At the very minimum, I am realizing, I am going to need to source dairy products, and preferably also flour and either tofu, beans, or chicken. In the meantime, the best I have to offer for weeks 2 and 3 of the challenge is red and white chard (the leaves of a beet) and kale (a type of cabbage) chopped quickly and sautéed in olive oil and butter (alas, not local) over medium heat for something like 8 minutes. You'll know the greens are ready when they've just started to shrink down, but are still bright. The result is so delicious, I am grateful that Jeff finds them bitter and I can eat the whole share myself!

I'll be posting my continued adventures in local eating - I hope this newbie's defeats and triumphs will be of interest to others playing with their food!