I Failed the Challenge, or What I Learned From the Eat Local Challenge

Eating a 100% local diet is just not easy. I tried, but I failed. And I failed for 3 basic reasons.

• Availability
• Finances
• Time

When I was growing up, we got much of our food from my grandparents. My grandfather raised beef and hunted, so we had a full freezer of meat at all times. My grandmother and my other grandfather both planted large truck farm type gardens and always preserved enough produce to get our family through the winter months. But as my grandparents aged and my parents moved away from the home town, our diets became more dependent on processed foods and packaged produce/meats. And our family menus became less routinely meat, potatoes, and a side vegetable. With the more sophisticated (and I use that term lightly) recipes came the need to mix foods from different regions and different growing seasons. And that was the crux of the challenge I faced in planning a menu for an entire week of local eating.

I have had to acknowledge how dependent my diet is on pastas and grains, dried beans, and nice cheeses. Without pasta or grains, I struggled to come up with ideas for packable lunches. A typical summer lunch for me is tabouli and a piece of pita bread. Bulgar is not grown locally, and while there is a bakery that makes pita bread in Durham, I don't know where the wheat for their flour is grown. Another summer favorite is white bean soup. While I can use locally grown tomatoes, onions, and garlic, white beans are not grown locally. So availability of basic staples of my diet was a significant hurdle in this eat local challenge.

The foods I did find cost me $58 for the week. In a normal week, I would spend about $35, or about 40% less than what this week cost. On the other hand, I don't normally eat this well or feel this happy about my weekly menu, so the additional costs were mediated to a certain extent by that satisfaction. By continuing on the experiment, I hope to find a happy medium.

But that happy medium is going to have to also be less time consuming. For one thing, I am going back to eating cereal in the morning so that I have time to walk before work. Eggs take 15-20 minutes to fix and eat; cereal takes 10 minutes total. That extra 10 minutes costs nearly 1 mile on my morning walk. I do plan to try and find cereal alternatives for the weekend though.

For my lunches I will allow myself to eat sandwiches again. However, I will start making my own peanut butter as soon as I decide which food processor to buy and I will continue buying locally produced cheeses even though they do cost more.

I also plan to go back to eating pasta. Why? Because I love it! I enjoyed spending the time and effort it took to eat locally this week, but I didn't enjoy sacrificing the pasta. "Happiness is not a matter of intensity, but of balance, order, rhythm, and harmony."

Thanks to Carolina Farm Stewardship for making the Challenge!

Carolina Farm Stewardship Eat Local Challenge

The Eat Carolina Food Challenge was initiated by the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association to promote locally grown and processed foods. From July 7-13, 2008, approximately 20 residents of North and South Carolina agreed to eat locally and to document their experience with a food log and blog posts.

I signed up for the challenge thinking it would be easy. After all, I've been eating locally for years, but I've never tried to make it 100% of a week's menu. The week started on Friday night, July 4, when I started putting together my shopping list for the Carrboro Farmer's Market. I would need something for breakfast that could be ready to eat in under 20 minutes; lunch food that could be packed and warmed up in the office kitchen; and dinner food, where I would have more flexibility.

I'd already been through Weaver Street Coop and knew that I couldn't document the "localness" of any of the bulk or packaged cereals for breakfast, so I was going to have to eat eggs. I don't really like eggs that much so I decided to make a zucchini and goat cheese frittata and biscuits to get me through part of the week. Then I would have grilled chicken for lunches and vegetable plates for dinner. Or so I thought.

Lunches were the biggest challenge. No one makes pasta from local ingredients or grows grains or beans, and those are my typical lunch staples. Couldn't find peanut butter made from North Carolina peanuts either. I'm going to be saving up to buy a food processor to make my own peanut butter, but I won't be able to rely on that for this challenge.

Last year when I took the Dark Days Eat Local Challenge, I found that Whole Foods sold chickens from Winston-Salem. Although I've been vegetarian for 30+ years, I occasionally lapse on chicken and turkey in the effort to incorporate more protein into my diet. Lapsing for the week sounded like an easy way out of the lunch dilemma. So after my Saturday morning trip to the Farmer's Market ($15), I trekked out to Whole Foods for the chicken, taking my barbecue sauce with me so that I could stop at a friends house and grill the chicken before returning home. Unfortunately, the butcher informed me that their chickens come from Pennsylvania, same place that Weaver Street gets theirs. Maybe I misunderstood before, or maybe they've just changed distributors. But for whatever reason, I now had a huge gapping hole in my weeks menu.

A trip back to Weaver Street confirmed my suspicion that without having purchased the veggies at the Farmer's Market, I was out of luck. I did, however, find some North Carolina cantalopes ($23 for cantalopes, local cheese, and milk). But I was still going to have to figure out how to use what I had already purchased to make lunch food. So I reshuffled and decided I could eat scrambled eggs for breakfast and put the zucchini, planned for the frittata, into squash fritters. Total cost for this day of shopping: $38. Already had the eggs, flour, and butter (not local).

My menu for Monday and Tuesday was:

• Breakfast: scrambled eggs (Latta Egg Ranch and Maple View Dairy milk) and cheese biscuits (Lindley Mills flour, local hoop cheese, and Maple View Dairy buttermilk)
• Lunch: Zucchini fritters and cantalope (yogurt for protein--not local); the zucchini was purchased from Elysian Fields Farm (CFSA members)
• Dinner: mashed potatoes, pickled beets, and corn on the cob. Potatoes purchased from Pine Knot Farms; beets from Laurie Heise, and corn from Sunset Farms. Pine Knot and Laurie are CFSA members, not sure about Sunset.
  

So far, so good. The only slippage between Monday and Wednesday, besides my daily yogurt, was breakfast on Tuesday. Didn't have time to make eggs so I resorted to my organic cereal. And I didn't drink local wine with my dinners. At $14 a bottle, it just exceeded my budget, especially since I have a case of wine bought last week at the annual Southern Seasons sale.

Now for the Thursday through Saturday planning. I learned that there was someone at the Carrboro Farmers Market that sold chicken (free range, chemical free) so I gritted my teeth and made the purchase along with some mozzarella cheese (Chapel Hill Creamery) and heirloom tomatoes from Alex Hitt for a total of $20. Gonna have to stick with eggs for breakfast. I really miss my cereal.

The chicken was frozen so I sauteed some veggies and mixed with pasta for Wednesday night's dinner, making extra for Thursday's lunch. Another slippage on the pasta. But I couldn't think of anything else I could take for lunch that wouldn't involve slippage, so if I'm gonna sin, I want to enjoy it. I love zucchini and leeks on pasta!

Menu for Wednesday through Friday:

• Breakfast: scrambled eggs and milk
• Lunch (Wednesday): Zucchini fritters and cantalope (yogurt for protein--not local)
• Lunch (Thursday): Pasta with sauteed squash and leeks and cantalope (squash and leeks from Elysian Farms)
• Lunch (Friday): Roasted chicken breast and cantalope
• Dinner (Wednesday): Pasta with sauteed squash and leeks
• Dinner (Thursday): Snacks at the Orange County Beekeepers monthly meeting (not local) where they were having their annual honey tasting. Quite a tasty dinner even if it was a little sticky.
• Dinner (Friday): Roasted chicken breast, tomato and mozzarella salad
  

I was out of milk so stopped by the Southern Village Weaver Street on my way home from work to pick up bread, milk, more cantalope, eggs, and some Carolina Brewery beer. The beer isn't made with locally grown ingredients, but it is a local brew pub, and I like it. Plus, I love the returnable jug. ($29)

Two more days to go on the CFSA Challenge, but I'm planning to keep this going, sort of, for the remainder of the summer. I don't like eggs for breakfast so I'm going back to cereal starting on Monday. For lunches, I'm planning vegetable pot pie and cantalope (these are REALLY good cantalopes). Veggie plates for dinner.

Menu for Saturday and Sunday:

• Breakfast: scrambled eggs and milk
• Lunches: cucumber and tomato sandwiches on Weaver Street Wonderful bread and potato chips (yeah, I know....the potato chips are not local, another slippage) (Cucumbers from Maple Springs Gardens and tomatoes from Laurie Heise at Wiseacre Farms)
• Dinner (Saturday night): Spearmint and Lemonade LocoPop and Benjamin Vineyards wine (spent at the Farmers Market in Saxapahaw where I also tasted some excellent cheeses from Hillsborough Cheese Company); not the most well balanced meal of the week, but maybe the most enjoyable.
• Dinner (Sunday night): cucumber and tomato sandwich (see above)

Thanks to the Carolina Farm Stewardship for issuing this challenge. Although I've always tried to eat as locally as possible, putting the extra constraints on my menu planning and shopping gave me a very different perspective on the meaning of local foods and the challenges of living and eating in a global economy.