Where are you at local food eating wise?

[NettleSongMama]

I just finished the book "Plenty: One man, one woman and a raucous year of eating locally", I had the chance to meet the authors as I was teaching a fermentation workshop at a harvest festival and they were the guest speakers.
It really got me thinking about how much food in my kitchen is local. Of course I know the importance of eating local but I started to wonder how hard it would be to be 100% local which is what they did for a year. I also wonder what that would look like with kids in the picture y/k?
We already eat much produce from our garden, we have pigs for meat, chickens for meat and eggs, goats for milk and cheese.......so I thought well, it would not be that hard. Fast forward to a quick stop into the grocery store to pick up some stuff, like 30 dollars worth of food (much of it organic), and I am unpacking it and realize not one thing is local!
So, I think, maybe I am fooling myself thinking it would be not too hard
It made me want to take my kitchen apart and put everything not local on a countertop and just look at it to organize if I could seek out more local products......
Anyone else think about this? How much does local factor in on your eating choices? has anyone done local exclusively for a period of time?

[UUMom]

I won't say it is simple--- but it is absolutely do-able.

[quietserena]

I'm bothered by how much I eat isn't local.

Bananas, avocado, kiwi, grapes, rice. None of those grow well in Missouri.

I tried to refocus this year and eat as much local as possible but so many things I get just don't grow here.

I think I'd have to change my diet significantly before I'd be able to go all local. My meat and dairy is local but my grains, legumes and almost all fruit in the winter isn't.

At one point we thought about redefining local to mean 'grown in the US' and even that can be hard to do when all the avocados available in town are grown in south America. Also, the whole Liberty variety escaped rice made me worry about eating rice grown in the US.

The more choices we have for food, the harder it is to make good ones.

[WildIris]

I think it would be very hard to exclusively eat local foods, especially if you don't/can't raise some of your own animals or have your own garden. But we're doing the best we can. All our eggs are from a local farm. And we have been doing much better at eating local since finding an organic local-foods-only farmer's market in our area this summer. We go every Saturday morning and stock up for the week. From there we get all kinds of grass-fed meats, raw milk cheeses, produce, fresh-baked breads, and (free!) chicken backs/necks/feet for the bone broth which I make almost every weekend. Plus I pick up my two gallons of raw milk from there weekly. But, we still supplement with a lot of store bought products. Dairy, for example--I would love to have ONLY raw milk dairy, but we are limited to two gallons a week which isn't nearly enough for our family. So we have to buy store milk to supplement, as well as any other dairy products we use--sour cream, yogurt, butter, etc. There is only so much we can afford from the local organic market--everything is much higher priced than what we can get at the grocery store. So we have to be choosy.

[beanma]

you might like to pick up Barbara Kingsolver's book, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle next. She and her family (teenager and preteen kids) did a year of local foods with a few exceptions (coffee, chocolate, olive oil). They did no bananas, avocados, etc. Very inspiring and easy read.

We have a great farmer's market, but there's a lot that's not in season anymore. We just had the first frost of the year this week and I don't know if it was a killing frost for the local farmers or not. My houseplants on the deck survived, but a friend's garden suffered.

Last week at the market I was able to get tomatoes, a baby watermelon(!), peppers, lettuce, mixed greens, arugula, yard long beans, yellow squash, zucchini, and goat cheese. We have plenty of local meats available, too, but we don't eat much meat. There's chicken, pork, beef, and buffalo (bison) at the market. I usually get my eggs there, too.

I put an emphasis on local, but I don't try to do it exclusively. There's no local wheat where I am for example. It's just not a good crop in our local foodshed. There is plenty of corn and there are local mills that grind wheat, but I don't think there's much of it grown around these parts.

[spughy]

We are about 80% local I think. No grains (or very few) are grown anywhere near here, so I buy flour *milled* here, and rice of course comes from away, but all our vegetables, all our fruit except bananas, all our meat, all our dairy and all our potatoes are local. We are fortunate enough to live in a climate where fresh local veggies are available most of the year, and we got a massive bag of home-grown potatoes free from a friend. So, like the 100-mile dieters, we eat a lot of potatoes! We are also fortunate enough to live in a place where most of the local meat production is also organic. I buy very little packaged stuff - maybe 1 box of pasta a month? Once in a while I treat myself to some French or English cheese. But if we had to, we could live quite nicely on 100% local food, although towards the end of December we would be getting mighty sick of kale.

We're in the same basic area as the original 100-mile diet guys except they were deep in the city of Vancouver and we are more conveniently located in Victoria, which is smaller and closer to more farms. Also there is *some* grain now grown on the island so with a little begging and pleading I'm sure I could scare up enough oats and wheat flour for our needs. We would have to rely on honey for sweetener, which is a pain in the butt, and of course salt would have to come from somewhere else (or we'd go through a whole lot of kelp and a lot of our baked goods would taste funny ). I use a lot of bacon grease and veal fat for cooking but I would still like to have my EVOO.

[momaste]

The blog in my signature is about eating locally and losing weight. (I've lost 32 lb.) When I'm really on track, I'm at about 85% local. Lately, I have been slipping, but am getting back on track again.

We're fortunate to live in an area with year round local produce, local meats and dairy, and even grains if they're actively sought out. It's harder in other parts of the country. I loved Barbara Kingsolver's book, and a variety of blogs about local eating, like ethicurean.com and lifebeginsat30.com and eatlocalchallenge.com.

[SageR]

This summer with the exception of a handful of spices, and sugar and tea for my kombucha we were all local. We are very fortunate to live in an area with fabulous local food resources. We can get organic pastured beef, pork, lamb, chicken, seafood/fish, and dairy; a variety of fruits and veggies, natural sweeteners, herbs, salt, vinegar....and then wheat, spelt, oats, cornmeal, and rye.

I didn't preserve nearly as much food as we will need to avoid buying from- away this winter, but I think as we'll only need to buy some produce we can still make it close to 75%.

Like pp, I think the difficulty level really depends on where you live and what is available. I know where my parents live in NH it would be tough. Seasonal produce, eggs, some meat...but you can't get local grains or dairy there.

As far as getting used to not being able to just eat whatever whenever it again was really pretty easy for us. Even with me going from being a lacto ovo vegetarian to eating meat again, I found the transistion easy. Again, we have great food here, and we started in the early summer so you have to take that with a grain of salt but...interesting thing - I notice I really crave foods that are being harvested now or preserved foods, but not things like greens or fruit. Like squash and grains are very very appealing, but the idea of a salad does nothing for me. Likewise mid summer I was eating tons of greens but didn't feel the need for much fat. So I think maybe once you get going your body tunes into the naural rhythm and you actually want what is available.

We do still buy coconut oil, olive oil, coffee, some spices, and tea and sugar for kombucha. I think I could do without those things, although dh would not give up his coffee willingly!

[nicolelynn]

I have always wondered why while living near Palm Springs, CA where we grow EVERYTHING under the sun, everything in our grocery stores is shipped in. The only way you can get some of the local stuff is small stands in Coachella which is a bit of a drive. Even then, nothing is organic here.

But last week on localharvest.org I discovered a CSA where the organic produce is grown just 80 miles from me AND they do a drop off in my town! Not only that, but I thought all pastured meat to be found was in No. CA but I found one just 80 miles from me as well....beef, chicken AND lamb.

So once we invest in those 2 things, at least half our food will be from less than 100 miles away. I want to order pastured eggs from the same area, but with shipping they come out to a whopping $14 a dozen! But even with just half of my food coming from a known source near-by, I will feel tons better than buying "organic" things from China and Mexico.

[Vaquitita]

those books sound interesting, i'll have to check them out.

i like to eat local, but am not strict about the 100 miles. I get california grown rice, olive oil, pork, lamb, beef, sour cream and consider them local enough though i'm sure they're grown/raised more than a 100 miles from here. Chickens, eggs, bread, fruit, veggies, honey, milk, butter, yogurt I get local.

And then there are things that just aren't, like coconut oil/milk, vinegar, tea, sucanat/rapadura, agave, grains (i just don't know about these, other than rice and the bread which is atleast made locally), seafood (the ocean is within 100 miles of us, but it's not that clean and mostly I just haven't researched this one yet), pasta, chocolate, bananas. And cheese, since we don't really like OP's cheese and the only other local cheese is neither grassfed nor raw so I buy irish and french cheeses -very unlocal.

Wow, that makes me think we don't eat as much local as I thought. Course on the not local list, only cheese is eaten daily. Well no, we do eat coconut oil most days and kombucha. Going by volume, the things we eat the most of are local -meat, produce, dairy, bread. Still compared to how we ate 2 years ago before I found the TF forum, we have made dramatic changes.

[HerbanGirl]

I'm challenging myself to eating within a 100-mile fooshed as much as I possibly can for the next year. I'm very lucky to live in an area where I don't think I'll feel at all deprived. The biggest obstacle so far (I'm two weeks into my challenge) is eating away from home. I do this less than I used to, but easily once a week for business lunches (I'm self-employed) and so forth.

I'm blogging about my experience too - my blog is linked in my sig. Sorry, not a very cohesive answer...my head is not all together tonight.