Thursday, May 24, 2007

A new experiment

Have any of you read Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally? It is the story of two Canadians who decide to live for a year eating only foods that come from within 100 miles of their Vancouver home. It is inspiring, alarming (where has all the crop diversity gone?), thought provoking and hard to put down. You can read more about their adventures at 100 Mile Diet: Local Eating for Global Change. We have been talking about doing this exact same thing for awhile now and I think we have picked August as our month to try. We are not quite ready to commit to a year. We live in an area with a farmer's market available somewhere 7 days a week. We live within 1 mile of the largest outdoor farmer's market in North America. We have been dedicated consumers of local products as long as we have lived here. We have not been exclusive however. The one item we are still thinking about is cooking oil. Butter and lard are readily available but we are still searching for local cooking oil. Salt is another one--there is no local salt. I will be writing about this a lot in the coming months, I hope you will stop by and share your own ideas.

Today we ate deliciously and mostly locally. Here is what we ate:



Thank you Dale Marsden for the honey!

Thank you Don Uselman for the cucumbers, strawberries and tomato!














Thank you John Carr for the Italian sausage!

Thank you Vivian and Richard Green for the asparagus (Evie can't get enough of it!)

Thank you Joanna Donovan for the rhubarb! There is no picture of Evie's gorgeous rhubarb pie sweetened with honey because we ate it all!

Thank you Tony and Sue Renger from Willow Creek Farm for the lard for the pie crust.

1 comment:

tiff said...

Barbara Kingsolver also has a book out about this very subject: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

We were thinking about doing something similar...we would have to tweak it a bit where we live...but it would be fun to try.