Leda Meredith, when she talks about eating local food, speaks from experience: in 2007-2008 she embarked on “The 250”: a year of eating, “almost exclusively foods grown or raised within a 250-mile radius” of her apartment (1). I’m impressed. My own six-day attempt at eating foods from within a radius of about 200 miles from home—which Megan and I did back in 2007—was, as I recall it, a week of being frazzled, cranky, and hungry, a recollection borne out by my comments on this photo and other photos in that set. I caved in and started eating non-local bread partway through the week because I was so miserable. And that was even with an exemption to the 200-mile rule for tea at breakfast, so I can’t blame caffeine withdrawal. (Meredith, it should be noted, allowed herself exemptions during her year of eating locally too: she did still have coffee, she let herself eat non-local food twice a month if she was eating out with friends or at friends’ houses, and she cooked with olive oil and salt, though the salt was sea salt from Maine: outside of the 250-mile radius, but still pretty local!)
Reassuringly, part of Meredith’s point in this book is that eating locally doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition: according to a quote from Eating Well Magazine that she includes in the book, “Buying 25% of your groceries from local farmers of a year lowers your carbon footprint by 225 pounds—even more than recycling glass, plastic, and cans” (1). And, as she also points out, eating locally can be a real pleasure: local food tastes good: fruits and veggies from a farmers market, CSA share, or a garden are often more flavorful than their grocery store counterparts, both because they’re fresher and because, unlike supermarket fare, they’re still being bred for taste, not just appearance and shelf life. Eating locally can also make you feel more aware of and connected to the place where you live: I like the way Meredith talks about getting to know local farmers and local geogrpahy, and thinking about the places where her food comes from as she prepares and eats it; I also like the idea of thinking about “what here tastes like,” a phrase Meredith originally wanted to use for this book’s title (6).
Well, I knew all that, but it was good to be reminded. I first heard about this book, I think, through a CSA newsletter—Meredith and I are members of the same CSA. (CSA stands for community-supported agriculture, which is to say: all of us buy shares in the farmer’s crop by giving him money up front, and in exchange, we get local seasonal veggies each week from June to November.) So the idea of eating locally isn’t new to me: I’ve been a CSA member for a few years now, and have been enjoying the farmers market since moving to Brooklyn. But I’ve been having a hard time getting through my CSA vegetables this summer (the fruit is no problem!) so I thought it might be good to have a little inspiration and advice in book form.
This book is quite NYC-centric, which I didn’t mind: I mean, I live here, so Meredith’s local food is my local food too, and when she mentions places like Added Value Farm in Red Hook or the Queens County Farm Museum it’s pleasing because I’ve been to those places, can picture the asphalt lot in Red Hook where there now are raised beds full of rows and rows of greens and peppers and other veggies, or the corn maze and fields and buildings and animals and open space at the Farm Museum in Queens, where I once went on a tractor-drawn hayride and ate a very good deviled egg. (Pictures from the Queens County Museum: here, here and here: it doesn’t look or feel much like NYC, but it is still within the city limits.) And it cracks me up when she writes about the “unofficial Park Slope recycling service” (Books or clothes or stuff you don’t want? Put it outside your building: someone will take it.). But if you’re not in New York, this book would probably be less interesting and less useful to you.
Still, there are some general points that I think Meredith articulates well. Like when she advocates “a reverse approach to recipes,” nothing that “after decades of having everything available all the time at the supermarket, people have gotten used to a recipe-first approach to cooking […] you decide what you’re having for dinner, make a shopping list based on your chosen menu, and then hit the store to get the ingredients you need. Never mind that those ingredients may not look very good that day” (49). Eating locally requires a shift in meal-planning: you start with the foods at the market or in the CSA share; if you’re eating a semi-local diet, you then figure out what else you might want to buy that will go well with that fennel, or that chard, or whatever it is. This was a really good reminder for me right now. Some of the other sections, like the parts about gardening and preserving and foraging, are less relevant to me but still interesting, although in these sections, as in the book as a whole, Meredith’s writing is sometimes a bit repetitive. Even so, I’m glad to have read this book: it motivated me to organize my fridge and write down all my CSA veggies so I know what I have that needs using up, and it provided me with recipes for refrigerator pickles, lacto-fermented snap beans, and crustless dandelion green quiche. Yes!
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