eating local

While preparing dinner the other day, I realized something had fundamentally changed in the way I prepare meals for my family.  No, the fact that our meals now all feature primarily local food that we either grew ourselves or purchased in the farmers market was not it - what struck me was that I no longer think about it.

My family always had a vegetable garden - in the 1960s my mom must have had the only garden in the Mississippi suburbs of Memphis teeming with asparagus, muscadines, and corn.  When I moved back to Mississippi in 2001 I really began serious vegetable gardening.  We ate our fill of broccoli and lettuce during the cool months and of peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes in the warm months.  But it was only in 2007 after I read Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, that I decided I would make a serious effort to eat local and with the seasons as much as possible.  I knew we could not be like Barbara and her family and spend a year eating exclusively local, bless them, but I wanted to try my best.  So I thought about it, a whole lot.  And I planned meals around local food, a whole lot.  And I bragged to my family about how this squash, etc. was grown by us or by a friend, a whole lot.  What a bore I must have been!

But at some point I stopped thinking about it and now it is simply the way we eat.  I don't know when it happened, exactly.  I thought about it again a few days later when I went to the grocery store.  As I wandered through the aisles, it hit me that whereas I used to frequent the store two or three times a week, I had not been there in a while, at least a week or two.  And this had become my pattern.

Now if we could just grow olives  around here. ... Rouse's is currently featuring Louisiana pecan oil which we tried and it is excellent, but.... well, I'm half Greek, so olive oil is an essential in my cooking.  But so are a lot of the staple goods we need like wheat flour, baking powder, vinegar, etc. and they are not available locally (yet!).  But the good news is that on the Mississippi Gulf Coast we CAN now buy most, if not all of the fresh locally grown and produced food we ususally need: seasonal produce, cheeses, butter, milk, yogurt, eggs, sausage, beef, herbs, etc., and of course seafood!   And we can buy Louisiana sugar and rice and more.

Of course, I always have lobster on my birthday and I don't I plan to give that up! But I think that the biggest impact comes from the changes we make to our daily lives and routines, not from the occasional splurge.

So what's for dinner tonight?  Corn, okra, and tomatoes all purchased from our farmers market vendors; potato salad made with Brent's potatoes and my eggs; and ground beef sliders made with Justin Pitts' ground beef and topped with John Folse's blue cheese.   We would love to hear about your local food meals and experiences.