This week (September 11 -19) is the week for the Eat Local Challenge in Vermont. (See Cari's post from Sept.4 about the challenge to eat local for a month...)
To provide a little background, an Eat Local Challenge attempts to encourage people to eat only foods sourced locally. Locally is defined in different ways by various people, but in Vermont, local means anything produced inside the borders of the state (as the VT Dept of Ag says: inside the state or within thirty miles of the state's borders). There is a "Marco Polo" clause that allows the use of spices and seasonings that 'a sailor could carry in his pockets for six months' - that makes salt, pepper, and things like that "legal". (It's not like there's a food police that's going to arrest you if an unapproved ingredient is used....) The idea behind Eating Locally is to make consumers aware of where their food comes from; how much fuel/energy/resources and effort go into the production and transportation of many "normal" foods. Challenges also showcase the flavor and freshness of local products, introduce the concept of eating foods 'in-season', and increase the money flowing towards the local economy (farmers and other producers).
Now that we know what the Eat Local Challenge is, how did our family do?
We failed miserably.
Normally, we try to eat healthy and "real" foods. Things that are not processed, created synthetically, or contain ingredients that are bigscaryscientificwords. "Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" is the philosophy that we've adopted. We can't put ourselves up on a pedestal as being totally true to that philosophy - we make mistakes, get lazy, and sometimes just don't see where we make wrong food choices.
We make good choices:
- we stopped making iced tea from a powdered mix because, well, using tea bags to brew our own is real tea instead of, "Sugar, citric acid (provides tartness), instant tea, silicon dioxide (prevents caking), natural lemon flavor, artificial color (red #40)". Home-brewed is cheaper and tastes better, too. We don't sweeten our tea - notice that sugar is the first ingredient in the mix...
-we switched from "Brand X" vegetable oil spread to real butter. Wandering through the grocery store one day, we found a small tub of salted butter - the only ingredients being milk cream and sea salt. It tastes pretty much the same as the oleo, but doesn't have nineteen ingredients (of which only three are recognizable - the other sixteen aren't even easy to pronounce).
We make bad choices:
- every once in a while, we purchase and eat tubs of pre-made mashed potatoes. Those loaded mashed potatoes with bacon and ham and chemicals and preservatives....For a small premium of time (maybe twenty minutes), we could prep real potatoes, boil them, and mash them - no chemicals or artificial flavors. This bad food choice comes down to laziness and poor meal planning.
- we buy plain ol' regular supermarket chicken (and pork and beef). Despite reading numerous authors' works on how industrial farms produce chicken (and pork/beef) and the, um...what's the word?..., appalling conditions in which these chickens are raised and processed, we still toss that styro tray of meat into the shopping cart. Why? We do it mostly because we are accustomed to eating meat as a regular protein source, and the industrial stuff costs less at checkout.
We make un-informed (or by-mistake) choices:
- we were in the store picking out some veggies for a salad (our garden wasn't so productive this year), and decided to get some bell peppers. The sign above the peppers stated that they were from a very local farm - good, since we're trying to muddle our way through an "Eat Local Challenge". In an attempt to include Little Man in the shopping choices, we let him choose which pepper (by color) to get. He picked the orange-colored peppers, so we put them in the cart. It wasn't until much later that we noticed the sign about the local farm was only for the green peppers - the orange one we picked was grown in Mexico. Chalk that poor choice up to misleading marketing/cross-eyed sign reading.
- we used to make mistakes by seeing a phrase that seemed to be good on a label, but turned out to be not so good. Examples? Buying wheat bread instead of 100% whole grain wheat bread. All-Natural - manufacturers are allowed to use the term 'all-natural' for synthetic compounds derived from a substance found in nature - that means that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) can be the main ingredient in an "all-natural" drink or snack. Ever seen HFCS occuring naturally? Going back to our guiding philosophy, do you think that Great-Grandmother would recognize HFCS as food?
It seems that your author has gone off on a ranting tangent and veered away from our central theme - eating locally. Please forgive the interruption.
To get back to the eat local results, we need to take a peek at some of the reasons our family failed. Mainly, it boils down to the fact that we did not draw up our normal weekly menu/shopping list. For a typical week, we plan every meal for each day. The meal plan is (a pain-in-the-a**) a carefully crafted document that tries to provide healthy meals. It also has to plan meals around the schedules of three people, have enough variety to stave off complaints, ensure meals are easy (read: quick - less than thirty minutes) to make, and, above all, make sure that the weekly grocery total stays low. Toss in the goals of sourcing food locally and following the "Great-Grandmother" philosophy, and you end up needing a lot of energy and focus to create the meal plan. It also requires more money to eat clean/healthy/local than it does to eat processed/unhealthy food. This week, we were short on money and time. Thus, we ate things that were quick and easy - but not necessarily good for us. Too bad that the eat local challenge didn't come a week later....after payday!
What the Eat Local Challenge did do for our family was to sharpen our focus on our food. As stated before, we're usually pretty good at following our chosen food philosophy. This week, as we made 'bad' choices (due to time constraints, budget shortfalls, or laziness), we were sure to identify a 'good' alternative. We started to weed out the areas of our eating that we hadn't addressed before due to ignorance or laziness. Even though we failed (bombed/choked/fell short) miserably at the Challenge, we still intend to work the "Eat Local" idea into our meals.
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