How Do You Get Your Food?

Last night I told Aaron we're in a new eat local challenge and explained the rules, the main ones being we do one 95% local meal per week. We kind of chuckled because this isn't much of a challenge for us. This is how we've been eating for a year.

Then today Alisa and JB from from 100 Mile Diet fame had a blog post about getting to the sources of local food. I've heard from lots of readers about how they would love to eat locally but they just don't have farmers markets nearby, don't have access to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), and the supermarkets don't display place-of-origin labeling (which may change sometime next year, at least to display country-of-origin).

The transportation piece of eating locally is something I've been thinking about a lot as I make changes in how I get around. Yesterday I took the girls on a bus-riding adventure to the co-op, something we've been doing a few times a month. This was a two-hour trip that normally would have taken about 45 - 60 minutes by car (I'm including the shopping time in there, too). But it was a glorious sunny day, unusually warm, and a great way to get through the witching hour after I stop working and before Aaron got home from work (though Clara still whined endlessly for some stupid red thermal bag she spied when we got to the market).

It wasn't an easy trip. On the way home I was carrying Iris in the sling, had my overstuffed diaper messenger bag over the other shoulder, and was shlepping two full shopping bags, one containing four dozen egg cartons and the other a giant container of honey, in addition to various produce and household items. Imagine if one of those had dropped or opened up!

Still, I carried all this through rush-hour bus time, happily. But would I have been so happy if I *had* to take the bus to the store every time we needed food? Would I bring the kids with me, considering this a lesson in alternative transportation and developing street smarts? Or would I be bitter and resentful and just give up and go to the Kroger-owned Mega Store 5 blocks away?

And if this was three years ago, this wouldn't have happened. I had a full-time job and worked in an office downtown. I couldn't even take the bus then, unless I was willing to trade my 20 minute commute for a 1.5 hour one, bussing the triangle from work to daycare to home.

Now, I have so many choices.

And then there's my favorite market, New Seasons. All the produce has state labeling, sometimes a label that tells you the name of the farm that grew the food. They mark processed foods created in Oregon, Washington and Northern California (the latter doesn't qualify as local to me, but I'll choose Cali before, say, Maine in most cases). The co-op does an even better job of this by including bulk foods.

I just re-checked the farmers market schedule and in October I still have a half-dozen farmers markets I could easily buy from. Next month I'll be down to about three that are still convenient, there will be two through December, and one is year-round.

I have so many options. This is all so easy for me.

But I've heard that it's not so easy for everyone. If you want to eat locally but find it's a lot of work, what are the challenges that you face? Are there ways to make small changes, like doing one meal a week that's mostly local, or does that feel like more effort than is feasible and worthwhile?

I think Alisa and JB's suggestions are great but I'm also keenly aware, as I was when I read Plenty, that they are childless freelancers in good enough shape to ride their bikes everywhere. Not everyone is in that boat; even now I'm not and I have more flexibility in my life than a lot of people.

So what *would* make it easy for you? What could you commit to? Or, if you have made small changes, what *does* work for you? And please understand, these questions are not rhetorical, nor are they meant to induce guilt! I really am interested in what's working for people and what are the roadblocks to local, sustainable eating.

One-car Family Update:
So far, so good. I haven't driven my Subaru for over two weeks, instead driving the BioBeast, walking, taking the bus or train, or using Flexcar, which I mostly use for work. So far Flexcar has cost me about $75 this month (all expensable), much less than the Subaru costs, which is close to $200 per month (only mileage is expensable). Aaron did drive the Subaru to Burgerville last weekend when I had the truck, but I contend that had he not had that option he would have walked to one of the many restaraunts in our neighborhood. Or just made some food at home.

I think it's time to just bite the bullet. I want to sell the Subaru while it still has some value. I think it's time for a tune-up and detailing. If you're in the market for a sweet, low-miles (65K) '98 Impreza, let me know!

Dark Days Challenge

Oops! I missed posting for the first week of the Dark Days Challenge hosted by my fellow Northwesterner, Laura from Urban Hennery. This is another eat local challenge for the months out of the year when it's not quite as easy to find as much fresh, local variety as it is in the summer months.

(from Laura's rules)

1. We have to cook one meal a week with at least 90% local ingredients
2. We have to write about it - the triumphs and the challenges
3. Local means a 200 mile radius for raw ingredients. For processed foods the company must be within 200 miles and committed to local sources.
4. We're going to keep it up through the end of the year, and then re-evaluate on New Year’s Day.

And I like these rules so I'll go with them, too. The 200 mile radius is a new one for us, but one meal a week, 90% local? I checked Google Maps and this radius includes a good portion of the states of Oregon and Washington so I'm not too worried about that restriction. I'm pretty sure we can pull this off.

Last week was a four-day-long recovery (really, still not caught up) after my Bay Area trip, followed by a funeral for my Uncle Floyd this past Saturday. (We're very sad to have lost him--achingly sad, really--but glad he is finally at peace after a long illness.)

Anyway, I've learned a lesson: pre-order an online grocery delivery before I leave on a trip to be delivered the day I return. I spent most of last week slapping together random meals, and local many were not. Observe: for lunch one day, the kids got gluten-free tuna noodles made with CoffeeMate instead of milk. And then they got it again at dinner.

This week we are all prepared. I did a huge grocery shop at the big store on Sunday afternoon and a little shop at the co-op this afternoon with the girls. I'm working on a series of meals that go through a week, made easier with a little pre-cooking on Sunday and then incorporating the leftovers into meals throughout the week.

Sunday I cooked up two chickens, though one was intended to be dinner that night. We had a birthday party, then I did my shopping, so I didn't get home in time to make the chickens for dinner and instead roasted them after the kids went to bed. We had sausage patties and a ton of veggies instead. I also cooked up a bunch of roasted potatoes that we used in a frittata tonight (totally delish, like souffle, probably the best one I've ever made, and I have no idea why).

Having all this food, much of it already cooked up, in the fridge feels like wealth.

Sesame Street - Buffy Nurses Cody

Ah, the Sesame Street of yesteryear. God, I miss you.

I don't know how we got to where we are today, when people are staging nurse-ins to remind folks that this is what breasts are for.

Would Sesame Street dare broadcast a woman nursing her baby today, without a Hooter Hider, or whatever those hideous things are called?

I so wish there was more of this in today's programming--low-key but pointed demonstrations of how humans are meant to feed their babies, without a lot of rhetoric or statistics or blah blah blah. Just showing how it is and quite simply why it's great.

Postscript:

Aaron told me tonight that when he was a kid in Ann Arbor, Michigan, his teacher's daughter came to his classroom with her new baby and demonstrated nursing. This included letting the children feel the firmness of her full breasts and then how they were soft and empty after the baby fed. Can you imagine any child having the opportunity to see this sweetest and most basic human act in the classroom today?

To The Bay and Back

I hadn’t been back to my alma mater, Mills College, since I packed up my dorm room, stuffed it all into my dad’s van, along with Aaron’s motorcycle (seriously, we put the bike in the van) and headed north to Portland. But this past weekend I headed down to the Bay Area for a journalism department reunion and finally saw the campus and all of its gorgeous Spanish architecture, inhaled the scent of the eucalyptus trees (I think this is what made me go to this school—that smell lifts you up and make you feel like you can do anything), and met up with a group of women I didn’t actually know (no one from my class was there) but all shared this campus, a beautiful and maddening little world all of its own.

I’d been back to the Bay Area many times, even to my old haunts in Berkeley, but not to campus. There are lots of reasons, too many to go into here, and as time goes on most of my old disappointments with Mills seem too inconsequential now to hang onto. For a few years I’ve wanted to renew relationships with the people and the professors I knew then, partly for your basic career networking, partly out of a desire to make connections with new graduates and help usher them into the working world, but mainly because they were such a big part of my life, they taught me so much, and I missed them.

I was on campus for a very short three hours, so I really didn’t get to see much of anything. And that was because I had to head across the Bay to see…

…Shuna!

Ok, really, you have to believe me. That white blob in the middle really is Shuna Fish Lydon. The LitQuake Lit Crawl reading was totally packed into at Laszlo’s, a skinny, dark bar in the Mission. When I first got there (sure that I’d missed her entirely because I’d had to drive around for 20 minutes looking for parking) the place was packed to the door and even when I stood on my tiptoes in the entry way I couldn’t see anything. I held my camera over my head and tried to hold really still, but as you can see that didn’t work out very well.

No matter. Shuna read her piece on recipes, which I knew well. It was lovely to hear her sweet, clear, sometimes creaky voice read her words aloud. This was a warm and witty Shuna (with just a smidge of bitterness thrown in there, which is her way). It wasn’t the Shuna of raw emotion I saw speak at Blogher when she spoke about the impact the words—the good and, especially, the bad--of food bloggers can have on an eatery, how they can make or break the fortunes of so many good people. If you’re not reading her series on opening a restaurant, which addresses this here (though somewhat cryptically) follow the series by starting here.

At the reading I ran into Jennifer Jeffrey, who has just published her crab book. We talked a bit about her two-part piece on feminism and cooking (part 1 here, part 2 here). This issue is one I’ve been contemplating for a long time, before and after Jennifer wrote on it. I keep thinking I need to write some kind of response, but…I keep running into work deadlines, field trips, housework, a funeral, dentist appointments, trips to the co-op where the damned local eggs still haven’t come in, coffee dates with friends I haven’t seen in months… I keep running into all the real-life craziness that women juggle when they devote themselves (by choice or for survival) to work and family and friends.

For Jennifer I think the food probably suffers before the writing. Though I only assume this because she’s published two books. For me, I know the writing suffers first. I could easily choose convenience food and have more time for writing, or anything. Right now I have to trust that the food has to come first, because that’s where the writing starts. The problem is I always feel like I’m stuck at the beginning and not making much progress.

Back to food…

Iris and I stayed with my cousin, Laura, and her sweet little family in San Jose. Sunday morning we headed up the street to their fabulous little farmer’s market. I didn’t buy much since I would be leaving the next morning, but now, looking at these photos, I wish I’d bought a little of everything and just ate my way through the rest of the day.

Laura, who’s lived most of her life in the Bay Area, chuckled as I went on and on about how lucky they were to still have green beans! And tomatoes! And eggplant! And strawberries! To her, this is all commonplace.

Sell your car, plant a garden

It's official: I'm a member of Flexcar!


After reviewing some material I picked up at their booth at the Green Sprouts festival a few weeks ago I did the math and realized that my 10-year-old, paid off, totally reliable Subaru Impreza, which I drive about 100 miles a month, costs me about $200 a month in gas, insurance and maintenance. Imagine all the local eggs I could buy with $200 a month...

One of the ways Flexcar make membership attractive to me is the gas is free! You're expected to fill the tank if it gets below 1/4 tank, but they provide you with a gas card so you don't pay anything.

So we're in the midst of a little experiment: Can I go without the Subaru and rely our on our BioBeast (the Ford F250, which runs biodiesel) and alternative modes of transport for a month or two? If yes, we'll sell it. And I like extra money so I'm determined.

This is the Scion I drove on my Flexcar maiden voyage.

Truthfully, it drives like a tin can and the instruments are poorly designed. But it got me there.

Aaron bikes or takes the train to work so the BioBeast is home all day. But it's huge. Last week I had a meeting downtown where I knew the parking situation was going to be tight. Not wanting to risk circling until I found a spot big enough for the BioBeast, and then having to parallel park, I reserved a Flexcar. There's one parked about three blocks from my house--totally convenient. I gave myself about 15 extra minutes to walk, picked up the car without incident and made my way downtown without fear of sideswiping anyone!

So far, I've only driven the Subaru when I'm being lazy, I've been too sick to walk (like this week) or I haven't planned ahead. For example: I was all set to meet a friend down on Mississippi for dinner and could take the #6 bus almost door to door.

But Iris hadn't nursed for most of the day and I didn't think about this until it was almost time to leave. I nursed her...then Clara had a meltdown and didn't want me to leave. By the time I got out the door I saw from my porch the bus pulling away from the stop.

Not wanting to make my friend wait 20 minutes while I took the next bus or got on the laptop to reserve a Flexcar, and not wanting to parallel park the BioBeast, I drove my car. But looking back, had I not had another choice, I would have driven the truck, it just would have been a pain.

Don't know if this is Flexcar art or if it's from the city, but I love this sign

I'm not sure how often I'll use Flexcar so I bought one of the low-use plans. My ultimate goal is to use public transport or walk/run/bike as often as possible, but with my tight work schedule sometimes that just doesn't work. And as much as I am a believer in alternative fuels, that gigantic F250 just isn't always practical for urban driving. I'll likely only use Flexcar when I'm going somewhere by myself, such as work meetings, because I don't want to constantly change out carseats. When the kids come with me, we'll drive the BioBeast.

If this works, and so far it seems like it will, we'll have an extra $150 bucks or so in our pockets at the end of the month. This will come in handy when I start on next year's vegetable garden!

To the Pumpkin Patch

Not our first visit of the year to Kruger's Farm, but the first for pumpkins.

Somehow, they still have strawberries. Sure, half of them were moldy the next morning, but at a buck a pint, and in October, you can't really complain.

There's more than pumpkins over in those fields...a sign of healthy, clean soil.

Who is that big four-year-old in the back, there? And maybe if that baby would quit fighting sleep she'd not be dozing on her feet like that.

That's the spirit, little R! Now Iris, if you would please just let us all get some sleep you might feel this chipper, too.

In case you can't already tell, Miss Iris, formerly The Best Sleeping Baby in the Universe, is turning us all into zombies by exercising her toddler will. Please pardon signs of sleep deprivation such as misspellings, poorly worded directions, and mistakenly omitted ingredients until further notice.

From eggbeater: Pastry Chef Am I. Moderne or Old-Fashioned? This is an example of why I'm madly in love with Shuna. God, I love indignant, passionate, slightly cranky and inspiring food writing.

I first heard her speak at BlogHer in July when, as the subject of scathing restaurant reviews came up, she gave an impassioned, teary request to food writers to remember the folk who are pouring their hearts and souls (and their bank accounts) into the food we eat and how our words can determine the fate of their livlihoods and their lives. I was smitten.

I am a complete sucker for an artist, which is why I've worked with them for the last 10 years (but oh, thank the heavens I didn't marry one). And I absolutely believe chefs are artists as they use all the same parts of their brains and bodies as any painter or designer. And I love anyone who is as devoted to her craft and her brethren as Shuna is. That passion and commitment is intoxicating and I love being around it (in the case of Shuna, reading about it).

Most of all, I love the product of that passion. I'm going to be in the Bay Area next week and I am so hoping I get to taste that "crunchy & sumptuous" chocolate cake!