www.eatlocalchallenge.com

Barack Obama to appoint Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture

by Jennifer Maiser, Editor

President-Elect Obama yesterday announced his choice for Secretary of Agriculture: Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack. The sustainable food community is incredibly invested in the choice for Secretary of Agriculture, and you have probably seen various petitions going around the Internet asking for Mr. Obama to make a Secretary of Agriculture choice taking a sustainable food system into consideration.

My inbox was full yesterday with people who were irate about the choice for Secretary of Agriculture, and wondering what to do next. Mr. Vilsack is known for his support of ethanol production and genetically engineered crops -- both issues which the sustainable food community opposes.

While it's frustrating to not see fast movement to save our food system with the new administration, I am encouraged by what I've been seeing. Since election day, I have never seen such a focused attempt by the sustainable food community to strategize what the nation needs, and how to achieve our goals. Expect to hear a lot more from the food community in the coming months.

I tend to not talk partisan politics here -- I feel that the choice to eat locally crosses party lines, and have seen proof of that theory.  But the choices being made at the top really do affect the power that the sustainable food movement has as a whole.

If you're interested in reading some really cogent responses to the Vilsack appointment, check out the following links:

Change we can Eat: an Immodest Proposal for Obama's Food Policy (Christopher Cook / Civil Eats)

Michael Pollan on Vilsack, Agriculture -- And Food (NPR)

AgSuck: Looks like Tom Vilsact to head USDA (Bonnie Powell / Ethicurean)

End of Challenge Notes

by Expat Chef

Funny thing, this Eat Local Challenge. It seems the more you try it, and the more others that try it, the less of a challenge it becomes.

A few years ago, the idea of produce after October would have been futile. This year, I still have CSA pickups for another two weeks. The farmers market changed over to a "Holiday Mart" for November, but two of my farmers still show up and I can buy even more from them in addition to the CSA box.

Next year, our CSA farmer is hoping to have enough greenhouses in that the CSA will run the whole year. The demand has grown, it's possible now to have year-round produce.

I'm shocked at the price people can charge for grassfed meat now that it is a "trend." I still pay $3.00 a pound for a split side. My chicken and lamb guy brings the meat to my doorstep. Local eggs and milk are on the store shelves year round. In the darkest, coldest days of February, well, something local is on the table at every meal.

Even so, the last farmers market is still a tough morning for me. I have to say goodbye to friends I won't see until April. I buy from each of them, too much produce, enough to put up for Thanksgiving and beyond. I buy a gallon of local honey from a beekeeper who emails me information about colony collapse disorder. I buy the most beautiful deep purple snap peas from the Thai farmers who have introduced me to many new vegetables this year. I buy heirloom pumpkins from the same farmer who grows alll heirloom tomatoes. I love his dedication to rare seeds, but his English is not very good, so I can't really explain all this well. So I buy as many as I can carry.

From the "Asparagus Lady" I can get greens and huge bunches of spinach, twice as much in a bundle as anyone else sells. Carrots, mustard greens, collards, onions.

One farmer has a grandaughter that spoils my little girl. He's got sorghum and chestnuts, potatoes, the last of the green beans. I give him a hopeful look, "Next week?" I watch the weather to see how much longer the season can last.

One by one, I say goodbye, but not completely. For a few weeks more, as long as they have produce to sell, I will come to buy. After the last for the season, I will use the pumpkins and sweet potatoes I have stored. The berries and green beans are put up in the freezer. The honey will last all winter. My Thanksgiving table will have local foods, including the turkey. I'll use the last of my sage, rosemary and thyme before winter sets in.

Spring is not so far away. The only real challenge is waiting out the coldest, cruelest months. Even so, the bounty come spring will be all the better for the wait.

If you are going to participate in the Local Thanksgiving Challenge, or at least have as much local produce as possible on your menu, here's a few recipes to get you thinking.

Apple, Sausage and Sage Stuffing
Cauliflower, Chard and Leek Gratin
Cranberry Applesauce
Sweet Potato and Aged Gouda Gratin with Sage and Thyme
Vanilla-Sweet Potato Pie with Pecan-Brown Sugar Crust

Fall Menu Side Dishes
Roasted Whole Pumpkin with Gruyere
Winter Risotto
Honey Sage Sweet Potato Pasta
Delicata Squash with Red Rice, Cranberries and Pecans
Maple-Orange Sweet Potato Souffle

Fall Menu Main Courses
Pumpkin Gnocchi with Walnut Cream Sauce
Acorn Squash and Chicken Sausage Cassoulet
Apple-Sage Roasted Chicken

Eating Locally in the North Woods of Wisconsin

So far, here in the far northern reaches of Wisconsin..this challenge has been easy-ish...for us at least.

I have a garden center where I teach folks to "feed ourselves"...we have had plenty of produce from our gardens.  I've been drying various foods like crazy for the long winter ahead.  I do some canning also, but drying is so much easier and less risky.

We have 7 apple trees, so there's loads of dried apple rings and applesauce and apple leather for the months ahead.

Berries and grapes, both native and cultivated, find their way into jams and leathers.  I'm drying 15 herbs for future use.

A few years ago I built my green growing area on the south side of my house, there are plenty of veggies that will continue to grow through the winter to feed us: broccoli, brussels sprouts, tomatoes, onions, beans...all will continue to produce for us until I give them their "fake winter break" from mid December through "wake up" in February when the sun gets high enough to get them all growing again.

The Hodag Farmer's market in Rhinelander, WI was a treasure trove of all the food products I don't grow or produce...honey, corn, certain squashes.  For the past 4 years, our meat has come from an organic potato farmer about 45 miles south.  He's grown us field grazed beef and pork and chickens.

We've been trying to eat locally for the past 5 years and doing a fairly good job of it.  I'm trying to find a variety of banana tree that will grow, potted in our greenroom and I'd like a fig tree and MUST learn how to grow peanuts in containers...because my husband will not live without his daily PB and jelly sandwich!!!!  I've tried to get him to eat local nut butter...but to no avail.....Any help with these issues would be greatly appreciated.

One of my on going projects up here is to find a local mom and pop restaurant willing to add local selections to their menu.  So far...no luck...but I can feel it happening soon!!!

LynnAnn owns and operates a people/earth friendly garden center in the far northern reaches of Wisconsin.

Gardening with Conscience is emblazoned on her sign.

Thoughts on Sustainability

The challenge of this October Eat Local Challenge is turning out to be flexibility in the name of long term sustainability.

For all the right reasons, I ate out-of-town yogurt and out-of-town cheese this week (as you'll see when I post my food log). I usually make my own yogurt, not because I'm a homesteader or particularly ambitious but because I don't have a regular, convenient source for it. Making yogurt is a long process because of the six-hour incubation period and it doesn't fit neatly into my schedule: too much time for after work and too little time to run as I sleep or while I'm at work. I need a weekend day, and there are only so many of those to go around, especially in October. So, I ended up eating some of the yogurt I use for starter culture. And while my cheese came from a local producer, deeper research revealed that they source their milk from Vermont (just outside my 100 miles).

There is a local brand of organic yogurt to be had, but my favorite natural foods store doesn't carry it anymore. It seems that it's a slow seller because its consistency varies from week to week. This is a natural occurrence when you use real biological ingredients from nature and no "cheater" chemicals. You'd think that natural foods shoppers would prefer this, but it turns out they don't.

I used to be able to get that brand of local yogurt at a nearby organic foods store, but they recently went out of business because, as they said, "it has not been economically viable to continue with a philosophy of a truly (98%) organic store." To say that the owner was inflexible in his dedication to organic products would be an understatement. I feel that his rigidity did a disservice to the community. Perhaps a philosophy of 80-90% organic would have kept his doors open. Perhaps a degree of flexibility now would have better served his goals for the future. I took his going out of business personally--he went out of business right before the October ELC and I'd counted on them being a food source when I signed up!

The woman who makes most of my raspberry jam also makes fig jam. She grows the raspberries herself and they are organic. She buys the figs in a supermarket. She tried cultivating fig trees in the past, but the Connecticut winters were too much for them (even bringing them indoors). She mentioned that she may try again in the future. I imagine that each time I buy her locally-made-with-non-local-ingredients fig jam, I am part of the encouragement for her to try to grow them again.

I believe that if we buy from local producers even when some of their ingredients are not local, they will eventually realize there's a market and start producing for that market. I make a point of asking each time, "Where do you source your ingredients and do you think you could ever source them locally?" When you see not-exactly-local items in my food log, they represent a small compromise on the path to a bigger goal (and it's certainly not for lack of trying!).

One day, there will be a food store on my way home from work that carries all of the local foods and ingredients I need. The proprietor will be able to tell me where everything came from. Since this is my fantasy, they're also open past 6 PM on a week night.

Sophie lives and eats in Newtown, CT (just east of Danbury). She chronicles her adventures as a local foodie at Late Bloomers Farm.

2008 Eat Local Challenge Blog Participants

by Jennifer Maiser, Editor

In addition to about 250 non-blogging participants, we have a longer list than ever of blogging participants this year. I would like to say that the late publication of this post is by design, but it wasn't.  However, in going through the list of blogs, I am happy that you will be checking them out this late in the month.  Many blogs give you a great sense of the Eat Local Challenge as a whole -- and you will be able to see the triumphs and difficulties with the challenge.  The list is broken down by region (and country) and interspersed with some of my favorite quotes from this month.

Belgium
Kate McNally

Canada
c’est pas moi je l’jure! • Hit Pay Dirt • Jen and Joey Go Green •

This is something I’ve noticed about local eating. I often have to do battle with my whims. I can’t just open a bag of potato chips when I get hungry, or most other prepared foods for that matter. Food preparation takes awhile and, unless a carrot or apple will do, I often go hungry while I prepare something more substantial. It makes me realize what a culture of convenience I live in. The idea of having to wait more than 15 minutes for food is foreign to most of us. -- Hit Pay Dirt, "Hunger Pangs"

Finland
Puikottelua

Sweden
Corpus Bon Vivant

Here in California, I’d say that everyone who lives here could easily eat at least 70% of their diet locally. In fact it would be a darn shame if Californian’s didn’t. I mean this is a huge agriculture state, in most spots it’s actually hard to keep things from growing. And the beauty of it is that we can grow things nearly year round. So we should be eating locally. It just makes sense. -- A Sonoma Garden, "11 Ways to Eat Locally in Sonoma"

California
Food She Thought • A Sonoma Garden • Becks & Posh • Butter is Love • Green LA Girl • Green Simple Frugal • Knitting Dahlias • Buy Local CA • Married With Dinner • The Inadvertent Gardener • Ward Road Garden • Jolly Ewe • Kale for Sale • What's Cooking Blog • A New Leaf Nutrition • Chez Us • Daaliciuos • Fight Like a Girl • Green & Chic • Kate Adelle • Kitchen Gadget Girl • Localette • Local Los Aneles • Real Farmstead Cheese • Simply Pies • Six by Ten • Spinach & Honey • Tiny Tummies • Tragic Sandwich • Windsor Green Grocer •

Mid-Atlantic
Bringing Down the Cool • Dagny Finds Faith • Foodie Tots • Cookin in the Cuse • Midge Pingleton's Pantry • Phlippin Sweet • Rural Recluse • The Salted Cod • Thoughts Like Pebbles • Walk Eastwood • Richmond Food Collective • Megan Seiter • All My Pretty Hates • Backyard Chili Bloggin • Eating Ithaca • Elizabeth Yalkut • Liberty on Tenth • Market Love • Richmond Food Collective • You are What I Eat •

What I'm figuring out about eating food from Michigan is:  while it's eminently possible to eat locally on a budget, it's not possible to eat locally when your life is on auto-pilot.  And I only call it auto-pilot because that's what the daily routine of glossing over life's small and meaningful moments (in an effort to get where?) seems like to me. -- The Farmers Marketer, "Food is love to the local eater"

Midwest
Accidental Wisconsinite • Food Happens • Big Adventures with Little Buddies • Cara, The 100-mile Diet • Fast Grow the Weeds • Green Leanings • Kaleidescope Living • The Farmers Marketer • Tofu is tasty • Vegan Cooking and Other Random Musings • Columbus Foodie • Lynnann's Path On Nature • Southampton Meat Market • Vegan Cupcake • South Depot Road • St. Charles County Wolds • Tigers & Strawberries •

The goal is not to “win” the Eat Local Challenge.  The goal is not to “prove” anything.  The goal is merely to learn.  Okay, Tammy?  Got that?  Everybody’s a winner when we do it that way, so calm down. -- Food on the Food, "Perspective"

New England
How to Grow • Living Local NH • Mango Triathlete • Northeast Kingdom Localvores • Octoberland • Seasons Eatings Farm • Veg Year • Brave Potato • Food on the Food • Camberville Cuisine • Dirt 2 Dish • Late Bloomers Farm •  Retro Domestic • Yankee Food •

Southeast
Dusty Skin and All • Felicitea • Greene Onion • Gulf Coast Local Food • Sticks n' Spin • The Peaceful Palate • Tiger Mel • Val Webb • Postmodern Feeding • Smart Coast •

The Eat Local Challenge changed the look of the grocery isles. Rather than rows of rows of "food," I now see rows and rows of containers on cargo ships, chugging into the Philadelphia Port to unload from somewhere far away. And I see oil consumption - huge amounts of it in airlines as they hurry to ship the California Carrots to the East coast to maintain what little freshness is left in them. -- Backyard Chili Bloggin', "What I See at the Grocery Store Now"

Southwest
Earth Reign • Green Grazing •

West
Eat Local Hawaii • One Green Generation • Accidental Scientist •  • Ellen's Grind • Forever House • Hendrick Homestead • Music & Cats • Not So Urban Hennery • Rocky Mountain Musins • Shiba Guyz • Baking for Babies • Bare Medicine • Café Mama • Chez Artz • Kona Yoga • Weekly Way • Chocolate Crayon Family • Ecoyear • One Healthy Year • Seattle Local Food •

Jennifer Maiser is the editor of the Eat Local Challenge website.  She is often found behind a camera, on twitter, or writing for her site, Life Begins at 30.

Eating Local Wherever You Are

I was worried about this October's challenge, I must say. With a trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina to navigate, I was not sure how I would locate local food. I tried looking for farmers markets on localharvest.org, but nothing showed up. No response for a query on Chow.com either. Things were looking bad for sticking to the challenge.

Eating local is, for me, a way of life these days. Not just a challenge, but a long list of farmers who are friends and an ease of knowing where to get what in my area, and when it is available. Every meal features a lot of local ingredients from dairy to meats, fruit to vegetable. Even in winter, our table is still graced by the meats stored in our freezer, produce we've put up, eggs, and milk. Leaving this familiar turf would be taking my locavore self way out of the comfort zone.

When we arrived in Norfolk, after two airplanes, we hopped into the car for another hour and a half ride. As we got within 30 miles of the beach, I was a bit stunned to see tractors, not sailboats, outside the window. And farm land. And farm stands. Butter beans, pumpkins, apples ... I perked up. Even the local grocery chain carried some local produce. Then I remembered what else I could get local — seafood. No way was this ever on the menu during a challenge month at home.

With a quick scan of Monterrey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch list, I made my list of the most sustainable choices for the area and it was off to the seafood store just up the street from our beach rental. Crab, clams, snapper, scallops all fit the menu. No shrimp with one allergy, but all sustainable choices. And all in my favorite seafood dish — cioppino. Finally, I got a taste of what eating local is like for some of our coastal ELC folks.

I also realized that eating local is not just do-able on your home turf, but very possible on the road. In fact, there is much to be celebrated by finding the foods in the new place that you can't get at home. I feasted in celebration, three bowls worth. Does it count toward the challenge if you eat MORE local food in one sitting than normal?

Cioppino, East Coast Version
4 cloves of garlic, chopped
2 onions, chopped
2 green peppers, chopped
2 bay leaves
2 tsp. red pepper flakes
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper
1/4 cup olive oil
2 tbs. tomato paste
1 1/2 cup red wine
48 oz. of chopped tomatoes
1 cup clam juice
1 cup low salt chicken broth
1 lb. lump crab meat (check for best varieties)
1 lb. crab claws
12 clams, scrubbed
1-1/2 lb. skinless snapper
1 lb. scallops
1/3 cup chopped flat leaf parsley
1/3 cup chopped fresh basil

Heat olive oil in large stock pot. Sweat the onions, garlic, peppers, spices for five minutes. Add bay leaves. Add the tomato paste and saute for a couple minutes. Deglaze with red wine. Boil to reduce the wine for 10 minutes. Add the tomatoes, clam juice and broth. Bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer for 30-40 minutes.

Scrub the seafood, cut the fish into 1-inch chunks. Add the crab claws and clams first. Cook for about seven minutes, up to 10 minutes. Remove the clams, discarding any that did not open in the cooking process. Add the fish and scallops, cook for five more minutes. Add the lump crab meat and cook for about five more minutes. Stir in the fresh herbs.

Serve hot, with crusy bread from local bakery. Savor with every bit of your Midwestern self. Reluctantly return home from the beach where you had no internet connection, no cell phone calls, and did not even wear a wristwatch for a whole week.

Come on over to Expat's Kitchen anytime for more local food. Though, perhaps not any more seafood recipes for a while ...

Briarpatch Community Fund Supports Eating Locally

I have been a member of the Briarpatch Cooperative (located in Grass Valley, California) for several years and have been delighted to see them focus on local foods in the past two years, putting together special fliers, tagging the products, and even encouraging people to participate in Eat Local challenges.  I work for a small community-based non-profit organization in Camptonville about 30 miles north of Grass Valley.  We have a Family Resource Center on the grounds of our local elementary school, and offer an early childhood program.  Together, we share a school garden based on the Edible Schoolyard principles, and the elementary school actually has a School Wellness Plan that includes offering organic and locally raised foods!

We are lucky to be located in the Sierra foothills, high enough to be in the conifer belt, but low enough to have a good growing season.  However, most of my neighbors only grow a summer garden, and when the frosts hit ( as they did early last weekend), everyone folds up for the winter, waiting until the following spring to get growing again.  I decided to turn to the Briarpatch Community Fund to apply for grant funding this fall, as I wanted our organization to host a special program encouraging greater food self-sufficiency.  I was delighted when they awarded us with a grant, even though I had only a month to quickly assemble and promote the program, which we held on Tuesday night.  Drawing upon the wisdom of our community, we were able to contact a few special people and plan for an educational evening based on the Twilight School model we have used since 1997.

Twilight School always starts with a free or low-cost community meal.

The first half of our evening program was a demonstration by our local nurserywoman, Jessi Wilcox of Rebel Ridge Organics, on what to plant in the fall (broccoli, cabbage, hardy greens, garlic and onions, flowering bulbs, cover crops incuding fava beans... the list is probably longer than you thought).  She also showed how to create hoop tunnels and use floating row covers to protect crops, extending your fall harvest or getting an early start in the spring.

Jessi highly favors using cover crops, and spent a lot of time describing the benefits; the biggest one that stuck in my mind was that you would be replenishing the soil for the next season.  She also recommended using rice straw (readily available in our part of California) to cover the beds, so that the beneficial microfauna would stay in your garden over the winter rather than migrating elsewhere.

Then, Robyn Martin of Olala Farms spent the remainder of the evening delighting us with stories of her 35 years of preserving food for her family of six while living mainly without electricity.  She covered using a root cellar (and reminded us not to mix the onions with the apples) and drying foods using recycled sheer curtains to keep the flies away.  She delved into salt brining, and explained that our Sierra Nevada soils are mineral deficient, especially of iodine.  Robyn swears by Celtic sea salt for making these brines, though most of us would need to decide to exempt that from our local food choices, since her experience has shown that there are more minerals and longer-keeping brined foods by using this source of salt over choosing other forms of sea salt.

Robyn also explained what lactic fermentation is and how those foods differ from brined ones, as well as detailed how to choose, pick and pack your foods for best preservation.  Here, Robyn (left) discusses a canning dilemma with young mother, Jessica.

I feel particularly fortunate to live in a community where there is a strong interest in self-sufficiency and re-learning the old food preservation skills, where there are people like Robyn who have the wisdom to share and Jessi who is making new scientific information available, and for a cooperative such as Briarpatch for supporting us!

What is a beautiful landscape?

My daughter and I are now in the Midwest visiting her grandparents, so all I was able to manage today was some more locally made bread for breakfast. I had intended to put some local organic berry jam on it, but when I cracked open the jar there was mold on top. So much for that. It's hard to lose even a little when you don't have that many options to begin with.

We made a day trip to Grant's Farm today (a sort of historical site/game park/family attraction outside St. Louis), and the highway goes straight through southern Illinois farmland. Having lived most of my life in the Ohio River valley and south-central Indiana, this is the landscape that feels like "home" to me. The open, gently rolling fields standing under a big sky, planted in corn, soybeans, or wheat, or serving as cattle pasture, punctuated by large single trees or little stands of forest, the clusters of farmhouses and outbuildings; seeing these vistas provokes a pleasurable nostalgia, a return to the backdrop for trips to my own grandparents and, later, my universities. It's harvest time now, and the fields are particularly attractive, glowing orange and tawny gold in the setting sun, the newly shorn rows of corn stubble proclaiming 'the human hand has been here.'

However, now that I'm invested in local and sustainable food, I'm reading other elements in these scenes, seeing the acres of monoculture and of crops that may be used for fuel instead of food; watching the huge combines and trucks that have become the symbol of industrialized, oil-driven agriculture; seeing the brown, dust-laden clouds carrying away vital topsoil to pollute our waterways and choke our oceans.

I think about the Eat Local Challenge and wonder what it would mean to these farmers if we were able to turn the agricultural system upside down; what would the fields look like then? Would they be unfamiliar; would they be beautiful? What would happen to the machines they've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy? Would the grain silos be empty? Is it possible some of them might return to using the magnificent draft horses we saw today for their original purpose? I wish I knew, and I hope we'll see the day when a reimagined landscape is not only possible, but profitable, and sustainable.

Angela Jordan is a stay-at-home mom, web designer, and local food blogger living in Mobile AL.

A Challenge for the Whole Family

by Sarah Beam

It is only Day Four of the 2008 Eat Local Challenge, and I've already tried three new recipes that will be added to heavy rotation at my house. Around here, eating locally during October (when the CSAs have ended their seasons and most everyone's personal gardens have gone to seed) entails much advance planning in that there aren't many available opportunities to actually purchase food grown locally. We have the Saturday farmer's markets in Athens and Watkinsville, and the Thursday pickups at Athens Locally Grown for the food that was ordered on Monday and Tuesday, but that's it. If I need eggs on Sunday, I'm out of luck. This is a sea change in a time of 24-hour supermarkets whose shelves are stocked with every imaginable foodstuff from around the world.

Maybe that's why they call this a challenge.

It is because of these purchasing limitations that I took some chances and picked up a few things we might not normally have bought. After all, I can't have us running out of food, now can I? And since a few of our usual fall-backs are currently off limits, most notably pasta, I'm finding myself willing to step out on a limb and get a little more creative with meal-planning. Frankly, this is right up my alley. I thrive on a good challenge.

My carnivorous husband generally tolerates more than supports my food purchasing proclivities so I had been more than a little concerned about how this local food pledge would affect him. One of my goals is to show my family why this is so important, not to teach them the virtues of self-denial. I want them to have as much fun as I am, to see this as an adventure, to be able to laugh at my missteps and foibles (and believe me, there have been more than a few), and to feel a sense of ownership and camaraderie when we do well.

Good thing my expectations aren't very high, hmm?

Amazingly, even when the odds have been stacked against us and time has been short and it would have been much easier to just open a box of pasta and toss it with one of the sauces I froze over the summer, my little family has thrown themselves behind me, transforming into my personal cheerleading squad, and cheerfully accepted one very late dinner and one less-than-satisfying dinner. And the tolerant carnivore who I had feared would roll his eyes at this whole undertaking? When the kids and I showed up at the Locally Grown pick-up point on Thursday, there he was, sitting on the steps in his work clothes, waiting to surprise us and to find out what the hubbub was all about.

I love my support squad. And I want so badly to make this worth their while.

So I have pulled down obscure cookbooks from high atop my shelves and I have picked up some ingredients we have very little (if any) experience with. The bread machine has earned a permanent home on my kitchen counter and I've scoured the internet looking for information on purchasing a pasta roller. I've learned how to make fried chevre, one of our long-time favorite restaurant items; I have finally mastered the art of making pizza crusts, thanks to my yard-sale bread machine; I have learned how to make sweet potato chips and succeeded in converting my husband from his former sweet potato spurning ways. Like I said, this is right up my alley. And I'm having more fun than is probably socially acceptable for a rural stay-at-home-mom just making dinner.

Sarah Beam cooks, eats and pretends to work just outside of Athens, GA. She chronicles her food neuroses at Recipes for a Postmodern Planet

A Peek inside the Pantry

by Val Webb

My significant other, The Perfect Man, designs and builds homes. His houses are not large, but he uses light and form to create a comfortable sense of spaciousness. A cupboard tucked here, a window seat there, a cozy set of bookshelves -- and the result is a house that quietly comforts and nourishes the people who live within its walls. When it comes to square footage, substance beats size every time.

That's how I feel about my kitchen pantry today. My groceries are all about substance: no frozen veggie burgers, no boxed snack crackers, just a few fresh local ingredients.  At the close of the second day of the 2008 Eat Local Challenge, there isn't much in there. But there's enough.

Breakfast was three locally grown satsuma oranges and a cup of coffee. The satsuma, familiar to most people in the form of canned mandarin oranges, is cold-hardy enough to grow here along the Gulf Coast. Late in the nineteenth century, sprawling groves of the sweet little citrus covered hundreds of acres just to our east, in Baldwin County -- until brutal freezes in 1894 and 1895 brought a quick and icy end to large-scale Alabama orange cultivation.  Since then, they have become a favorite of backyard grovesmen (The Perfect Man has several young trees) and small farmers. Tiny, leather-skinned and sweet as honey, they are scrumptious replacements for my usual morning glass of commercial orange juice.

I made the short trip to a family farm market across the bay in Daphne, scoring a few more provisions for the pantry shelf: Mississippi sweet potatoes; coarse grits and corn meal from a Louisiana town 20 miles inside my 200-mile limit; local peanuts still in their big, knobby shells. And wonder of wonders, on a rack near the cash register was one lone remaining loaf of walnut wheat bread just waiting for me to invite it home for lunch. (It was made by Jane Holland Smith, The Bread Lady, who works her bakery magic in a special kitchen she built next to her house. She's always my first stop during our downtown farmers market season.)

Alas, the locally grown zucchini I bought never made it to the pantry at all. Atticus assumed that the green oblong was a strange new chew toy. Judging from the expression on his face, it was very tasty.

Val Webb is an illustrator and clay artist living in Alabama.  Val's writing can be found on her blog, The Illustrated Garden.