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.

so what exactly is "Real Food?"

When we founded the nonprofit organization "Real Food Gulf Coast" in December, 2009, co-founders Diane Claughton and I never discussed what we each meant by the term "real food."  We must have each had our own ideas and I guess we each figured the other agreed.  Ordinarily that would be a recipe for disaster, right?   But maybe since we have agreed on pretty much everything else regarding farmers markets and local food since we met in 2007 and started working together on local food matters (well everything that was important which means directly involving food and agriculture) it was a reasonable assumption.

But maybe now is the time to talk about what it means to us.  Especially now since Diane recently loaned me a book called "Real Food: What to Eat and Why," by Nina Planck.  I had never heard of the book before July 15, 2010 when she handed her 2006 autographed copy to me. So I figured she was trying to tell me something and of course what else could I do but start reading it?

But first, what did I personally mean by real food?  Well, I meant fresh, local, seasonal produce and food that does not have any chemical preservatives, additives, or "natural or artificial flavors" (and if you read "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser you know that those so-called "natural flavors" are pretty artificial too.)  

But what does Nina Planck mean by "real food?"   Nina says in her book, firstly, "real food" is "old....foods we have been eating for a long time" which includes "meat, fish, eggs, butter" and NOT margarine which she calls "hydrogenated vegetable oil made solid and dyed yellow." (yuck).   Nina also writes "fermented soybeans, miso, tofu" which are about 5,000 years old are "real food" but "isolated soy protein," a "by-product of the industrial soybean oil industry" is NOT.

Secondly, Nina says "real food" refers to food that is "traditional [which] means the way we used to eat them." (when exactly?)  "The way we used to eat them" includes produce that is local and seasonal; whole grains; unrefined fats and oils."    Nina goes on to say that in "real food" the method of "farming, processing, preparing, and cooking ENHANCES nutrition and flavor, while the industrial method diminishes both." 

Hey, I can live with that definition, for now.  What does "real food" mean to you?