Saturday was our second trip to the Farmer’s Market this season, and although I managed to forget my pencil and paper, I did consider it a research trip for our official foray into the 100 Mile Diet. And boy, was it a learning experience.
Let me preface my remarks by saying that, although I lived in the city until September, when I moved to a town of 1500 people (still relatively close to a big city), I spent a lot of time on the farm growing up. I have relatives who farm for a living. I shoveled more than my fair share of poo when I was a horse-riding teenager. But even so, in some way I have lost my connection to the land.
It’s so easy, in this day and age, to lose that connection, and so hard to rebuild it. For example, I’m learning that even if I want local eggs 52 weeks a year, chickens molt. When they molt, no eggs. So I either need to try to find a farmer with chickens that molt at a different time than my usual supplier, or do without eggs when the chickens are tending to their new feathers. Oh, and the milk required for making all the great local artisanal cheeses we’ve been trying in the past few weeks, requires a grass-fed diet. Guess what, that’s just not naturally possible in Colorado over the winter. No milk, no cheese. The cheese has to be aged 60 days, so our miracle almost-100-mile-diet cheddar (made in Durango, so definitely not within 100 miles, but at least made in Colorado) will not be available for a good portion of the year.
Sure, we can get fabulous Haystack Mountain (about as local as you can get from Lyons to Niwot!) goat cheese all year ’round. That’s not my point. We’ll hardly starve without cheddar for a few months a year. My point is that we didn’t even think about this type of thing until just over a week ago when we decided to embark on this experiment. Even if you know where your food comes from (grass-fed dairy cows outside of Durango, for example), do you really understand where it comes from? What goes into the milk, how the cheese-making process occurs, how the cheese is aged? This is something that, on a basic level, most people knew about maybe as few as 100-150 years ago. Where has that knowledge gone? Evaporated into the ether of the local super-market, I’d wager…
On a similar note, I spoke with the gentleman who is grinding grain at the market. I told him I thought the Winter Wheat flour I bought last week was too coarse for regular daily-bread-type baking and he agreed. He’s ground it finer this week–excellent! But then I asked the question that showed my lack of connection to the land: What about Rye? Grows in the winter, so if he doesn’t have it now, he’s not going to have it until next spring. But he will have barley soon. That sounds like a fun experiment. But can I live for a year without rye, when it’s the key ingredient in my killer pizza dough?
OK, it’s not like there’s only one person who is grinding grain into flour within 100 miles of here, but my point is that we as a culture have gotten used to going the grocery store and buying a fresh strawberry even if the damned thing had to be shipped to us in a refrigerated truck/plane/ship all the way from Timbuktu. When it arrives, it doesn’t even taste like a strawberry, more like some sort of crappy replica of a strawberry. But you still buy it at King Soopers, eat it, and forget that strawberries are so much better when they’re sun-ripened and fresh-picked, which can only happen if you a) travel to Timbuktu in the off season or b) buy local!!!!
I know my son is young to grasp all of this stuff, but he informed me that I must buy him a watermelon this weekend. When I told him there weren’t any at this time of year, he truthfully pointed out that our friends had had some just last week. Sigh. I don’t want to be the mean mommy that deprives my children of things like bananas, watermelon in April, or tater tots, but jeez, my children have a chance at naturally, and for the whole rest of their lives, nurturing that connection to the land, the seasons, and ebb and flow of the universe in a way that I, as an adult, am struggling to do. If I answer the hard questions about the lack of watermelon now, will they thank me for it later, or like the teenage daughter from Almost Famous did, castigate me for moving Christmas to July so it would be less commercial…
7 comments
Julie says:
April 20, 2008 at 4:08 pm (UTC 2 )
Oh, we’re already on the Sweet Maria’s bandwagon, but we buy their roasted beans. Matt really wants to roast our own and I may cave in…Oh, I hadn’t thought about the KitchenAid attachment. We have the cheese grater and pasta attachments and have nearly burned out the motor, but ah, the joys of a lifetime warranty!
Yeah, I’m going to be growing sugar babies for my sugar baby this summer, but Gabriel wanted watermelon NOW and I refuse to buy it from South America. It just doesn’t taste as good as the sun-warmed August type.
Julie
Hatchet says:
April 19, 2008 at 10:21 pm (UTC 2 )
Actually, you can get a mill attachment to a Kitchen Aid mixer, if you happen to have one of those.
Um…and my coffee crazed husband roasts his own (See Sweetmarias.com online for roasting equipment and beans) after discovering that green beans last 6 months while roasted beans start going bad within 2 weeks. If ground, in an airtight package, they last 5 hours.
I hear you on eating local being a problem here. The folks in CA are spoiled! Now, however, with the growing challenge, I think we’ll be able to eat a lot more locally, but we’ll have to wait for a LOT of it. You can grow your own watermelons in CO, btw. You just have to get a short season variety like Sugar Baby. That’s what I will be growing for Caitlin, since she asked me to grow one for her.
Also, I think if you get most of your stuff within Colorado, that should count as local! Peaches? Cherries? Plums? None of those grow on this side of the Western Slope.
Julie says:
April 18, 2008 at 7:28 am (UTC 2 )
I think Matt would like us to roast our own, but I’m adding the equipment for that to my list of other things we’ll buy when we win the lottery (a large-scale cider press, a grain mill so I can grind my own flour, solar panels)…I think we’ll have to settle for Kind Coffee out of Estes Park. At least the roasting is local even if the beans come here from the far reaches….
Nicole says:
April 17, 2008 at 10:51 am (UTC 2 )
It IS tough!! And a lot of my hang-up is that when I think vegetables and fruit I think fresh. Somehow pasta sauce and dried fruit don’t count in my mind. I’d say we should all move to SoCa…but I think they have enough people already!
Have you guys tried roasting your own coffee? I read about it once and it sounded very cool.
Julie says:
April 16, 2008 at 3:19 pm (UTC 2 )
We don’t have the answers yet. The thing that was frustrating to me was that all the people I’ve found who are blogging about the 100 mile diet are in southern CA, where it is much easier to eat locally (i.e. they have year-round farmer’s markets and things besides slush piles actually GROW outdoors in January). So I thought to myself, “we should do this.” Because we’re not busy enough, you know
I think it needs to be both grown locally and processed locally to really count for the 100-mile diet. But I also think we’re going to have LOTS of exceptions, like the coffee Matt mentioned, like fruit this winter (we’ve already said we’ll get citrus from Texas–I’m just not depriving my kids of that), and, um, well even Colorado-grown wine is grown on the western slope, which is clearly more than 100 miles away and you know I’m not giving up my vino!!!!!
Matthew Artz says:
April 16, 2008 at 8:16 am (UTC 2 )
I hear you on the M&M discussion. Okay, so I have no interest in eating M&Ms (I’m not even a big chocolate fan), but I am a coffee snob. I don’t just want coffee, I want premium, single plantation, micro-roasted three days ago by a professional coffee taster coffee. The nearest coffee is grown is southern Mexico (and that’s not even the stuff that I like).
So do I give up coffee, list it as an exception to our 100mile diet, buy locally roasted, … ? Lots of things to struggle with.
Nicole says:
April 16, 2008 at 7:29 am (UTC 2 )
Yeah, watermelon was ours too. S wanted watermelon BADLY in January. There IS no watermelon in January!!
We’re not ready to go 100% local, but we are being aware of where food comes from, etc. It’s hard when you live *here* and so much good stuff/good FOR you stuff is not available locally at all so I admire your endeavor!
So here’s an interesting question. Say you live miles from the M&M’s factory….but the ingredients for M&M’s are trucked in from who knows where. Can you eat M&M’s because you live 5 miles from the factory or can you NOT eat M&M’s because all the ingredients aren’t local? This global economy makes this a hard mental exercise for me!