Welcome to the first (real) Sustainable Sunday post, and Happy Easter and spring! What better time to begin a blog journey together with me as I fill you in on how we are trying to become more sustainable here at Slate Range Camp. Thanks to so many of you that committed to support me in getting my Permaculture Design Certification, this should be the first of many posts to come. Let me know what you want me to discuss, and I will do my best to accommodate.
Where to start… where to start? Sustainable living is such a big, huge subject and so few of us are really able to even begin doing it. If you disagree, go take a quick look at the labels on the food in your cupboard and then come back…. If you had taken that step a few hundred years ago, you probably would have found some containers in your pantry, but most would be hand-labeled and, unless you were wealthy, most of the food would have been grown within a few dozen miles of where you lived, even if you were a ‘townie’. There would be far less variety. You might not ever eat an avocado, or an orange in your lifetime, and if you lived inland, you might have never tasted fresh crab. These are tastes I love, and I am very lucky to have been born in California, but thanks to overfishing, fresh crab now comes from other countries, rather than the San Francisco Bay (oh, and the ones in the Bay are now considered too toxic from mercury washed down into the Sacramento River Delta from the gold-mining era!).
Now, food is routinely shipped around the globe! What would it take to get back to a localized diet? Those who follow the Eat Local Challenge blog, or have participated in such challenges over the past few years already are groaning, because no matter who you are, it would likely mean giving up something you really, really love… like chocolate, or coffee, or seafood if you live in the Midwest, avocados if you live anywhere north of Los Angeles or Phoenix. You get my drift. We have become so accustomed to eating whatever we like, whenever we want it, that it takes a lot of thinking and planning to even begin to get your head around making a change to food without a lot of food miles on it.
What do I mean by ‘food miles’? The real cost of something has to include all the methods used to grow it, package it, ship it, and market it, and then you can add on what it took to get it home to your pantry or refrigerator. Most of the foods we commonly find in the grocery store travel between 1,500 and 2,000 miles to get to us.
I did some research for you, trying to find a calculator online where you could plug in a food and your zip and get a calculation for how many food miles it had traveled before you started eating it. Kind of like a calorie counter, right? Well, I wasn’t particularly successful, but I did find that some of the most promising research on this topic is being done by the Leopold Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, at Iowa State University. There’s a lot to wade through on their site, if you are interested, and I am sure glad they are doing all that work for us.
Now, for what you can do yourself. Start slowly. Or dive right in, depending on how you approach things! Either way, start by looking at every food label, and paying attention to what is grown and produced in your region. Are there orchards? Farmer’s markets? FFA auctions? CSAs? (community-supported agriculture, though I bet you knew that one already!) Where else can you link up with your food? Think of this as getting back to your hunter-gatherer roots, and start switching out things. Maybe you will find that you need to take cooking lessons…. Another new adventure!
In the photo at left, a little friend is sampling local blueberries, grown on Heaven and Earth Farm about 10 miles from my home. Take special note of her home-made, recycled berry-picking container... now that is the kind of resourcefulness I'm talking about!
What if you don’t like cooking? Here in my region, there’s a community-supported kitchen where you can buy locally grown and made food, as well as our local food co-op, where foods are labeled as local, including a wide array of deli choices. This movement has really been catching on across the country since I first started writing about it back in 2006, and I am looking forward to hearing your stories about how you are connecting more with local food.
Here’s a list of good resources:
Eat Local Challenge
One Hundred Mile Diet
Here's a tool to help you map out what exactly 100 miles means from your home, and a link to the group that really got me started.
After I read about the Locavores, I bought Jessica Prentice’s book, Full Moon Feast, which discussed what was in season throughout the wheel of the year. I greatly enjoyed reading it, and it really set me in motion changing how we eat.
Starting in 2006, we have grown and put up more food each season... we had given that up several years ago, when our children left home, thinking we didn't need to store as much food. Now, it's nice to be 'stocked up' and also helps us make sure we are eating food that didn't travel very far. I will be filling you in on food preservation throughout the summer.
Of course one of the most wonderful books to read, for support, thinking, laughing and the recipes, is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver and her family.
And, another really cool tool to help you start thinking about eating seasonally: the local foods wheel. Unfortunately, they are only available for the San Francisco Bay area and the New York City area. However, just reading through the list about when all these foods we take for granted come into season can be very eye-opening and will make you appreciate very bite far more. While you are reading down the list, think too about how much healthier we would be if we made a point to eat a wider variety of foods each week; that’s really the topic for another post, but since my purpose is to get you both thinking and doing, I thought I would throw it in the mix.
I think that's probably more than enough for today, and look forward to seeing you next Sunday!
