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Inspiration and Information
Eat Local
by Tammie Ortlieb
My family has a small garden plot out behind our two-story white colonial. I have my green peppers, my cucumbers, and my beloved garlic. My husband lays claim to a couple of Beefsteak tomato plants—one very pumped up on steroids, lean, mean, tomato producing machine and one struggling to keep up with big brother, not quite Beefsteakish excuse for a plant. My nine year old proudly nurtures along Jalapeņo Pete and Cadillac Corn. I named my animals when I was her age. She names vegetables. Regardless, this tiny corner of our otherwise manicured suburban lawn supplies us with some exquisite summer suppers.
Without realizing, my family and I have been practicing the very basics of local eating. A newer concept in natural foods, a locavore is someone who eats strictly foods that have been produced locally. The exact definition of local is different, though, depending on the consumers involved. Alisa Smith and James Mackinnon, authors of Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally , set their "local" as within 100 mile radius of their one bedroom Vancouver apartment. Barbara Kingsolver, on the other hand, author of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, professes her family's desire to eat only foods "produced in the same place where we worked, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air." Additionally, Kingsolver stresses that one doesn't necessarily need to live on a farm to eat locally.
In fact Rob Gardner and his wife, Sheila Essig, an Oak Park, Illinois couple have been eating locally now for two years (check out the story at the Chicago Sun-Times' website). What began as a response to a challenge set out by Locavores, an online community dedicated to eating locally produced foods (www.eatlocalchallenge.com), has morphed into a lifestyle for this urban couple and their family. Locavores, rooted in the San Francisco Bay area, stress that taste and nutritional benefits of area produce far outweigh those of out of season goods or those that have spent far too much time on a truck. Likewise, eating from community farms ensures a more efficient use of fuel and maximum benefits to the soil, air, and water. These are, perhaps, the major reasons why even urban families such as Rob Gardner and Sheila Essig are turning back to the land they inhabit for sustenance and spiritual nurturing.
That local produce is fresher and buying such supports the area economy is pretty much a no brainer. But few of us realize the environmental impact of our weekly shopping trips. The typical foods we serve up every night at dinner have each traveled, on average, about 1500 miles before landing on our plates. That is, approximately the distance between Denver and New York City. In addition, Smith and Mackinnon suggest that in the time most of us spend driving to the supermarket, parking, shopping, driving home, and unloading our goodies, we have killed time "nearly equal to that spent preparing foods from scratch twenty years ago."
Even just one meal a week of locally grown foods can make an environmental difference. Kingsolver, in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, shares that if every person in the U.S. ate just one such meal weekly, we could cut the country's consumption of oil by more than 1.1 million barrels each week. BARRELS, not gallons.
Mostly, those who have gone the locavore route marvel over the connections they have made with their neighbors and their homes. A getting back to the land feeling, if you will, that has bonded them with those they live among and the earth that supports them. From the hills of Virginia to the ocean breezes of the San Francisco Bay area to the city streets of Oak Park, Illinois, families and individuals who have made the switch to a more in touch way of eating question their once disconnected long distance relationship with food.
Pardon me, now, if you will, but I must go throw a little compost on Jalapeņo Pete. He's looking a bit hungry.
Tammie Ortlieb is a freelance writer with a Masters Degree in Developmental Psychology. Her work has appeared in VegNews, Veggie Life, Vegetarian Baby and Child Online Magazine, and Mothering.com. She resides in southwest Michigan with her omnivorous husband, three terrific teenagers- two veg, one wannabe-, and a you-tell-em-like-it-is-sister future green revolutionist fabulous fourth grader.
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