We all hear about the importance of buying local. When I was younger and less environmentally minded, I thought the point of buying local was to help support your local businesses and to therefore put money back into your own community. This is definitely a very important part of the buying local ideal, but it wasn't until the past couple years that I really stopped to think about the environmental aspects of buying locally.
When we go to the grocery store, look at the labels where your food is coming from. Sweet Potatoes from Georgia, Apples from Mexico, Coffee from Guatemala, Rice from India, Quinoa from Peru, Kiwi from New Zealand, and the list goes on and on. All of that food had to get to your grocery store through a long series of transportation vehicles like semi-trucks and planes, all producing a lot of green house gases contributing to our current climate problems. This is done on a massive scale. Food from every corner of the globe is arrive at not only your own grocery store, but at the thousands and thousands of groceries stores across our country on a very regular basis. If you are contemplating riding your bike to the grocery store instead of driving to reduce your carbon footprint, an even more effective technique to use would be to buy local items. There are farmers markets, co-ops, local farms and distribution programs in most areas across the country in which one can get food that was grown within a short drive from their home, and trust me, as someone who works on an organic farm and helps run a stand at the farmers market, we would love nothing more than to be able to help support you on a quest to eat locally. A recent study came out that suggested that 80% of an average American's food can be grown within 100 miles from his home, yet it is far, far more common for people from Wisconsin to buy lettuce grown in California and shipped to them than it is for them to go buy lettuce grown by their neighbors.
But, if you are trying to eat locally, what do you do when the snows of winters come? When the local farmer's fields are barren and the markets come to an end? When the local co-ops stop featuring apples from down the road and start selling apples from South of the border? What is one to do then? Well, it wasn't all that long ago that this gigantic international food system was not in place and super markets did not exist. Before that time, one very important way that people went about eating was preserving the food they had an abundance of earlier on in the warmer months.
Pickling, canning, fermenting, preserving, storing, freezing, drying, they are all options that we still have today and can make use of if we want to be able to eat locally in the winter and reduce our carbon footprint! They are each ways that you can take food grown by yourself, or by a local farmer and be eating it well into the winter. It is currently January 3rd and on my shelf I still have about 20 jars of pickled cucumbers and beets from this season that I canned myself, and if I go in my fridge I still choose from 8 jars of Kimchi I made, and in my freezer you will find frozen tomatoes, corn, peas, berries and a few other assorted vegetables. Each time I make a meal or even a snack out of one of these items, it's one less meal or snack that I would have had to buy from a grower far away that has been shipped here for me, even in the dead of winter. So, if you take a bit of preparation in the warmer months and buy and preserve an abundance of things, eating locally in the winter is very possible! And trust me, your local farmers will love you if you come up at the end of the season and tell him or her that you want to stock up so you can enjoy their produce all winter. It is also very worth while to investigate and see if there are any places in your area that can local produce and sell them throughout the year. In the next town over from where I live there is a restaurant/store that sells canned goods all throughout the winter that they can from a local farm. So, even if you don't get a jump on it yourself, you may be able to help out a local business and still eat locally in the winter at the same time.
I will expand upon this idea much more in later posts, especially when the farming season approaches again, and I will give a step-by-step on how to do the different food preserving methods that I've used, but for now there are many great books and online sources on that material readily available. For fermenting in particular I'd recommend a great book called "Wild Fermentation" by Sandor Katz.
I hope you find a way to keep your spirits warm in the long cold nights of January, and keep thinking of and trying new ways to "Go Green" even in the winter. Next time I'll be talking about something I've been dabbling with for a few years now but which recently I've started to take more seriously; Brewing Kombucha!
