eating seasonally - only locally grown food

[meemee]

have any of you tried to eat locally grown food? and only food that is seasonal in your area. mostly, thus rejecting summer veggies during winter. 90%

dd and i have been on this experiment these last few months.

and i've been pretty exciting. luckily i work in exchange for a CSA box and visit our local farmers market (we have an asian one where thing are not organic but i know hte local farmers and know who DO grow organically but cant afford to buy teh license) so really it is not costing me much. 

for instance - i've never really cooked with squash. now i've learnt to cook with 6 different kinds of squashes and have learnt to make a whole bunch of things with them.

its quite exciting for now knowing we cant eat certain foods - like tomatoes. its also exciting because our food variety has increased a huge amount. before i was only eating maybe 3 or 4 kinds of greens. now i eat at least 10 different kinds of leaves. 

have any of you tried this? how did you feel? did you food variety increase?

of course we dont follow the rules when we are invited for dinner. 

[cristeen]

Variety definitely increased when we started this. There are a few things that aren't local (like most of my fats), but my meat and produce have all been local for about... 2 yrs now? It is more expensive, mostly the cost of meat, but i just joined a meat CSA (first pickup today), which will hopefully cut my meat budget in half.

[meemee]

yup some of my fat is not local either, and neither are some of my grains and legumes. there are no grain CSAs where i am nor a legume CSA. i am able to get some of those stuff directly from the farmer. 

meat we eat v. rarely but we do get it locally and yes it IS expensive unless we get it from friends who slaughter animals on their farm. but since we rarely eat it doesnt affect my budget that much. 

what is amazing is because i volunteer for my box how reduced my food bill has gotten since we are eating locally. 

[Koalamom]

I try to eat locally but it is sometimes expensive.  Like organic dry beans at the healthfood store in the bulk bins is like 1.50 lb and local organic heirloom beans are 2.59 lb.  Still I am so blessed to have so many local goods around.  I got local grass fed bedf suet for a dollar a lb, and local fresh pressed prganoc sunflower oil for a good price and dh works for a grass fed angus beef farmer (and pigs and sheep too) so we can get all the local meat we want.  There are many great connections around.  When I read Animal Vegetable, Miracle, I did notice that cost wasn't an issue for the author.  But for me it is and I have to buy conventional most of the time.  Or I work harder to get food.  Like this year I got orgaoc local apple seconds/drops for a great deal, but I had to make apple sauce right away as they wouldn't store long term.

[Alyantavid]

We mostly eat in season and local.  But it's extremely hard in the winter.  I do grow my own food and we eat that all winter, but I do buy fruit for my kids to eat all winter.  It's mostly apples, bananas and grapes.  The apples are local, but bananas will never be something we can get that's been raised here.  Fruit is the only produce I buy out of season and not always local.  Luckily I live in a farming community so there are lots of option available.

I think it's a wonderful thing to do, but it isn't always possible.  I refuse to buy tomatoes in the store, any time of the year, so those first ones every summer are amazing! 

[meemee]

allyson what about persimmons? we had a bumper crop this year and really gorged ourselves. this was the year for grapes and tomatoes. had a huuge amount. 

dd and i stopped eating bananas a while ago after we read about the effect banana trade has on the local population. we eat it maybe once in two months if that. i cant remember the last time i had one. 

i hear you about tomatoes. and this year we discovered carrots. fresh carrots. its unbelievable. most carrots we get at our local conventional store - looks fresh but has been stored for months if not years. i can never buy conventional carrots again. same thing with a lot of food actually - including fruit. we no longer can eat strawberries or for that matter any berries out of season having tasted fresh ones. i wonder why mulberries are never in the market. we always associate earth day with mulberries. 

unfortunately i dont have access to land to grow my own food. :-( being involved in the farm i am blown away by the impact it has on dd. 

one of the projects i am keeping an eye on is - i think the govt - or locals trying to start an urban farm in Detroit and the difficulties they are facing because of the short growing season. i hope they can pull it off because that area so needs it. 

[laohaire]

We eat mainly local - not 100% or anything, and I don't worry about it enough to even track how much. But all of our meat (which is not much) and all our vegetables and much of our fruit (we still buy bananas, which are not local to Massachusetts, plus we buy citrus in the winter - otherwise all local fruit, and we're still eating apples we picked last fall).

Have been doing it for 2 full years. Our vegetable CSA makes it so easy for us to eat in winter, because they have a winter CSA. We eat from their root cellar, plus they grow some greens in the hoophouse. It's not even difficult for us - it's more like we look forward to summer vegetables than truly miss them.

Though our CSA does the root cellaring work for us, I have started doing some preservation of summer vegetables. Not much for the 2010 harvest year (all dehydrated stuff - mainly a half bushel of tomatoes I dried, which is actually enough because I'm the only one who eats tomatoes for anything other than sauce - plus a shocking amount of hot peppers, and some this-and-that veggies like zucchinis and such that I dried to drop into soups). But I'm getting a pressure canner for Christmas! And have plans to try to can at least 50 pints of tomato sauce for 2011, which is a start. Plus plenty of other things, including taking a stab at jams and just fruits (peaches mainly), applesauce, broth (yay! I'll finally have room for all the broth I can make! I hate store broth!), some corn and just some experiments with a few other things to see what we like.

My personal feeling on expenses is that fruits and vegetables are competitive price-wise with the organic stuff at the store overall. Some specific items might be a little more expensive locally (but not much) and others are actually cheaper. It also depends on quantity - buying a half bushel of canning tomatos was a major steal, for example. Animal products (meat, dairy and eggs) are more expensive in every case. And grains are also more expensive. So I would advise anyone wanting to start out to stick with vegetables and fruits and go from there. For me, the major thing I want to do is switch away from factory dairy - we rarely eat local dairy (due to $$, nothing else) and we eat a LOT of factory dairy (cheese, mostly). For this to be realistic, I think we'd have to actually reduce the amount of dairy we eat, change our diet. Since we never ate factory meat before, we didn't have to deal with that diet change - we rarely eat meat (for $$ reasons) and ONLY buy local meat when we do. So the dairy part is our major challenge. And I want to do it, not because I'm stuck on the local label, but because I do not feel ethically ok about factory dairies.

[Alyantavid]

Originally Posted by meemee 

allyson what about persimmons? we had a bumper crop this year and really gorged ourselves. this was the year for grapes and tomatoes. had a huuge amount. 

dd and i stopped eating bananas a while ago after we read about the effect banana trade has on the local population. we eat it maybe once in two months if that. i cant remember the last time i had one. 

i hear you about tomatoes. and this year we discovered carrots. fresh carrots. its unbelievable. most carrots we get at our local conventional store - looks fresh but has been stored for months if not years. i can never buy conventional carrots again. same thing with a lot of food actually - including fruit. we no longer can eat strawberries or for that matter any berries out of season having tasted fresh ones. i wonder why mulberries are never in the market. we always associate earth day with mulberries. 

unfortunately i dont have access to land to grow my own food. :-( being involved in the farm i am blown away by the impact it has on dd. 

one of the projects i am keeping an eye on is - i think the govt - or locals trying to start an urban farm in Detroit and the difficulties they are facing because of the short growing season. i hope they can pull it off because that area so needs it. 

It looks like it's a little cold here for persimmons.  Every year my garden has one thing that doesn't produce well and this year it was tomatoes.  I have some in the freezer, but not nearly what I usually do.  We do have grapes too, but again, it was a bad year for fruit all over the area, so we didn't get much there either. 

Mulberries are very hard to harvest, imo.  We have 2 trees and they produce a ton of fruit but it's hard to pick. 

[wemoon]

I am trying to move toward a local diet. Unfortunately, I picked the wrong time of year to start, but that's OK. I do what I can. I joined a meat CSA last month, which is nice. The meat is soooooo much better than feed lot meat! I am considering joining a vegie CSA in the spring. I'm in Minnesota, so we have a super short growing season. I'm going to try to grow a decent garden this year. Last year it went ka-put because I didn't plan it very well.

[catnip]

We eat almost entirely local produce. It's hard to find local beans and grains in California, the land is just too expensive here to grow them profitably. This time of year, we're eating a lot of roots, leaves and different kinds of squash, apples, pears, kiwi and citrus.

[wemoon]

One nice item that I recently found local is whole wheat flour and corn meal!

[plantnerd]

Does it still work if you are eating frozen seasonal foods?  Example- freezing buttloads of tomatoes and beans in the summer and eating all winter?  All the greens here froze this week with our lows in the low teens, I would be a sad girl without my veg until february.

[sanguine_speed]

We do our best, but with many food preferences in our family I also do buy non-local foods like pineapple and bananas and fats.  

I find it painfully expensive sometimes, but I do it anyway.  For example, my Christmas turkey will cost almost $200.  I could buy the same sized bird at the grocery store for $30 right now.

[meemee]

aaaaaah sanguine i hear you about the turkey. thankfully we dont eat a lot of meat so i dont really crave it.

its just my dd and me and we are both choosing to enjoy and relearn eating food (yeaaaaah she is finally taking school lunches and stands up when other kids tease her about her food. she now finds that food yummy!!! woohoo).

the thing is once you eat the real thing you can never go back to the regular stuff any more.

does that happen to you guys? or maybe i am too sensitive where taste is concerned. meat is the worst for me. raw grocery meat gags me. i can smell it. a smell that fresh meat does not have. i have been spoilt with eggs, tomatoes, broccoli and carrots. just the sight of those super kool aid orange carrots makes my stomach churn. 

plantnerd - i guess that would work. freezing and canning. esp. because of where you live. i have been studying the life of native americans in the yester years in your area. and i found something interesting. during winter they did v. little veggies but ate a lot of meat, fish, etc. come spring they go back to mucho veggies and very little meat. of course they also spent winter days not eating. (its something i am looking into too). they knew food was scarse in winter yet they never saved their summer crops over for winter. 

and so i wonder. do we have to have veggies 365 days of the year. could we survive on meat or grains and some veggies the winter months and then go back to huge amount of veggies. i am also looking at that seasonal aspect of food. 

[Alyantavid]

Oh definitely.  There's alot of stuff I can't eat from the grocery store.  Meat especially grosses me out.

Originally Posted by meemee 

does that happen to you guys? or maybe i am too sensitive where taste is concerned. meat is the worst for me. raw grocery meat gags me. i can smell it. a smell that fresh meat does not have. i have been spoilt with eggs, tomatoes, broccoli and carrots. just the sight of those super kool aid orange carrots makes my stomach churn.  

[wemoon]

Originally Posted by plantnerd 

Does it still work if you are eating frozen seasonal foods?  Example- freezing buttloads of tomatoes and beans in the summer and eating all winter?  All the greens here froze this week with our lows in the low teens, I would be a sad girl without my veg until february.

Yeah, totally! I will be doing a much better job of doing that this next growing season.

I can't stand the smell of conventional butter or milk anymore. It just smells sour.
 

Originally Posted by Alyantavid 

Oh definitely.  There's alot of stuff I can't eat from the grocery store.  Meat especially grosses me out.

[freestylemama]

We do pretty well depending on the season.  We have our own chickens and get milk from a nearby farm.  We buy part of a local cow every year as well.  We eat seasonally during warm months and try to put produce away.  We still end up buying a lot of our food from outside of our area.  Our co-op does a cool thing where it labels all of the local foods so we always choose those when they're available.  Rice, flour, coffee, bananas, avocados, most cheese, oil, tea, coconut oil, curry pastes, condiments, spices and many snacky things (although we have an awesome potato chip factory nearby that uses local potatoes) are rarely local, so we would never be all local.

[laohaire]

I absolutely consider preserving the local harvest to be local eating, absolutely.

And I also agree that there are different traditional ways of eating, including eating just (or mostly) meat in winter. I personally do consider meat to be a fall and winter food.

I also hear ya on the turkey. We spent $90 on our Thanksgiving turkey. I can hear everybody in my head telling me I'm crazy, but we stand firm on what meat we're ok buying (no factory meat). We could have easily gone without turkey at all (we always used to go without before we found this source) but at $3.75 a pound, this bird was the cheapest good meat we could buy! I consider it a good deal, kind of a bulk purchase of 24 pounds of meat. We're still eating it, actually (I'm thawing portions from the freezer by now of course). Turkey pot pie... yummmmmm.

[cristeen]

Originally Posted by catnip 

We eat almost entirely local produce. It's hard to find local beans and grains in California, the land is just too expensive here to grow them profitably. This time of year, we're eating a lot of roots, leaves and different kinds of squash, apples, pears, kiwi and citrus.

I'm in CA and have no trouble finding local rice, sometimes the farmers mkt also has local cornmeal and local buckwheat flour. At certain times of year i can also get dry beans... At our mkt they're not openly available, but i know who has them for regular customers. I also know a mkt where theres a guy who sells pretty much only beans. My BFF has gotten them for me before.

[catnip]

I can get fresh beans in season, and dried cranberry beans in the fall, but not in any kind of quantity. We do eat a lot of rice. I've never found cornmeal or other flours at a market I actually frequent, though I've seen it at the Davis farmers Market and co-op, and a few times out in the Bay Area, but no place I can buy them without traveling farther than is remotely practical on a regular basis. When I've asked the farmers that I know about it, "can't sell it for what the land's worth" is consistently the reason given.