Filed under: Dollars and Sense
One of the recurring themes in my blog is in how local is defined, particularly how it is defined in the consumer marketplace. Whereas local may be a 50 mile radius to me, for the Lakewinds Food Co-op it is a five state region. However, once we put the literal mileage to rest (or state borderlines), there is an underlying insidious question.
Just because the company or farm is local, does it mean the food is grown locally? As one reader commented, the butter may come from within fifty miles, but the milk may not. This has troubled me right from the start of this experience. The awesome Grassland butter has “more than 100 suppliers in the Midwest region generate the cream used in Grassland butter.” Sigh.
And that’s just for the butter.
What about the grains? Or the local cereal company? Or what about the bread my food co-op makes every morning?
Sticking to a rigid local diet requires more vigilance than you can imagine. August was that rigid month. But I am trying to stay less rigid — so I can eat a balanced healthy diet. So my rules change constantly. I try to go back to the root of what’s important to me about eating locally so that I don’t become dogmatic about something that no longer makes any sense. I want to support the locally grown and raised products when they are available. I want my food as fresh as possible, which hopefully translates into as tasty as possible. If the butter is available within a fifty-mile radius, it’s in my refrigerator. If the cranberries are grown 176 miles away, it is okay, if they aren’t also grown 20 miles away. But oranges? Pineapple? Banana? Salad? These are foods I haven’t had much of in the past two months. And my body’s response to this change in diet is a craving for new foods and flavors (vitamins and minerals).
Local is something of a moving target.
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