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!