Locally Grown

So what's the big deal about eating local?

I think I've always wished I lived on an acreage, but we never seemed ready or able to make such a move. I feel such a loss now that my kids will never have that experience, especially since my dad died nearly 5 years ago and my mom sold their acreage and moved to town.
Being on a farm was a large part of my childhood, though I was only a summer visitor to my grandma's farm in Iowa. Most of my childhood was spent in suburban Long Island, New York, about as far away from Iowa farmland as you can get!
I loved picking raspberries to go with ice cream after haying, picking apples from the orchard, helping my cousin gather eggs, holding the baby chicks, and eating my grandma's homemade apple pies and applesauce. Nothing tasted better than the catfish my uncle caught in his ponds, fried up that very same day.

My dad was a horticulturist and we always had a garden of some sort. Often it wasn't in our own yard, but in a patch he'd prepared at work. My dad worked as director of horticulture at several different public gardens on Long Island. These public gardens used to be the summer homes of America's robber barons, a la Carnegie. Down the generations the families could no longer maintain the properties as private residences so they became public gardens. We lived on the grounds of two of these former "family" homes, Planting Fields Arboretum and Bayard Cutting Arboretum.
My mom always canned tomatoes, applesauce, and huckleberries, made pies from scratch, and put up beet pickles and bread and butter pickles; somewhat uncommon, I think, for the Long Island woman of the 1970s.
So I always had good food, made at home, and a connection to the land and gardening.
Maybe this experience led to my openness about local eating, and I have long tried to limit my meat eating, what little of it we do, to sustainably and humanely raised animals.
Michael and I have always had a garden, though until recently, it's often been quite small and relatively poorly tended! When we moved to this house nearly 3 years ago, we made a determined effort to downsize our lifestyle and raise our standard of living. This involved converting most of our yard to vegetable/fruit gardens and perrennials, eliminating waste wherever possible, and embracing a simpler life. We aren't there yet, but we've made a lot of progress.

I think the real turning point for me was reading Michael Pollan's Omivore's Dilemma, followed shortly thereafter by Better Off, The 100-Mile Diet, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I realized the importance of supporting small farmers and that research is beginning to show that locally and sustainably produced foods are, in some ways, healthier. I know they are almost always tastier.
My husband works in industrial agriculture, so I certainly live with a fair amount of hypocracy. I think the world would be better off if local foods were grown by local people for local consumption. Unfortunately, seed company's proprietary rules and extensive mono-cropping often prevent this from happening in some of the poorest places in the world. And it just doesn't make sense that the bulk of our agricultural acreage goes toward producing grain to feed to animals. It will become ever more imperative as the world population continues to grow to reduce the amount of meat consumed per person; something I don't think the developed world, especially Americans, are ready to embrace.
It's also important to me to support local economies, and what better way to do this than to spend my money for goods produced locally, to people who pay local taxes and will spend that money locally as well? It just makes economic sense to me to buy a bag of spinach at the farmer's market where the farmer herself - no middle-man involved - gets the profit. And I get spinach that is fresher, likely safer, and healthier than what comes sealed in a bag at Dahl's.

After nearly an entire year of eating as locally as possible, my kids can taste the difference between a store bought apple and farm grown, between the "fresh" strawberries purchased off-season and those locally grown and frozen at their peak of flavor, between dill pickles at a restaurant and those we made at home. It's been a long time since I've bought ground beef at a grocery store instead of from a farmer, but I'll never forget the "rotten" smell of grocery store beef cooking versus the rich aroma of farm fresh, grass pastured beef.
We've always eaten well, with almost all our meals made from scratch. This makes eating in a restaurant a typically less-than-satisfying experience for the whole family. But cooking with ingredients picked when ripe or plucked right out of the garden, or meats grown humanely and naturally, or eggs laid fresh that very day, imparts a quality to our meals I never would have imagined possible.
Buying locally also gives my family a connection to the land and to where our food comes from. How many children have never seen a real chicken? Eaten a fresh egg? How many don't know that raspberries grow on bushes and that potatoes grow under ground?
It seems unhealthy and perhaps a little dangerous for people to be so disconnected from the foods they eat. I want that connection for my family and myself, and to foster a sense of community responsibility.
Most of all, however, I want the foods I eat to be as fresh, ripe and delicious as possible.