I like a good challenge. My current challenge will be going
locavore for a week in conjunction with Salt Lake City’s Eat Local Week. Locavore
was the Oxford Dictionary word of the year in 2007. Urban Dictionary defines it
a “A locavore is someone who eats food grown or produced locally or within
a certain radius such as 50, 100, or 150 miles usually for ecological
reasons.” After researching this
movement and thinking through the end to end process, it seems doable with some
planning and time set aside. I can find
local eggs and butter and produce within a mile walking radius of the house. The
SLC Eat Local challenge, running 09/12/2015-09/19/2015, seems to indicate a
consensus of a 250 mile radius. Some say that’s not very big but it does allow
me to borrow from other states like Wyoming. I’m a bit intense and take
challenges like this quite literally and therefore am taking a strict approach.
For instance, I am not eating chocolate,
drinking coffee or tea, using oil like olive oil or coconut oil for consumption
purposes.
I even started
thinking about the packaging of local items. Bottles and plastic aren’t local
but I’m going to make an allowance for hard to find items like nuts which do
grow in farms in southern Utah. I buy
most of my items in bulk or farmer’s market so packaging shouldn’t be much of a
concern. I’m trying to combine this challenge with other former challenges of
giving up plastic and riding my bike to these places because gasoline isn’t
local either, even if it is coming from Texas or Alaska and certainly isn’t
environmentally friendly.
Going local means
thinking about my local community and what benefits it, not just eating local.
I won’t buy unnecessary non-local things like clothes and shoes as I have plenty by this point. I will
continue to use products for non-consumption purposes like deodorant and
shampoo (you’re welcome). It did get me thinking though… could I make these
items too from just local products? I think I could with a lot of work so
that’s for some future homesteading point in my life when I’m preparing for the
final days before the zombie apocalypse or I have tons of time on my hands. But
how cool would it be to have truly local product? I look at local products and
think – well, that’s not entirely local is it? There’s an Eat Local movement
with branding and what not. I think there needs to be an even more specific
label for “Truly Local” if all ingredients were locally sourced and
manufactured locally. My local chocolatier, although they’re good and conscientious
(even though Solstice stopped using paper packaging and switched to plastic and
won’t respond to my email inquiry about this change), it’s still not really
local if you think about it. It’s from Africa. I don’t live in Africa. I also
can’t grow chocolate in Utah. And I’m a chocoholic! I have looked into a tree
called chocolate pudding. I am seriously considering buying this.
It really is a global landscape that we are dealing with for
every single thing that we touch. We are quite removed from processes and
consequences of mass-manufactured, low-cost items. California’s water
reservoirs are depleted because farmer’s are providing almonds and many other
resources to the world. Wildlife in California is suffering from lack of water.
Also farm workers, particularly in California, suffer grueling conditions with
unbelievably low pay. I would rather give fair wages to the farmer’s and their
family at a Farmer’s Market. If I focus
on my food needs within my community and even my own backyard, my carbon footprint
is greatly reduced. Also, it’s pretty convenient to walk outside when I need a
certain herb or vegetable. I grew up having a garden. There’s no question if I
will have a garden from year to year. It’s a part of me.
I’m a bit crazy though and thought, what if I make a simple
product and all resources that went into making it were local. An example would
be lip balm. So I get beeswax and make essential oil from sage and process
lanolin from local wool. Compress that together and wrap in paper. But the paper
isn’t local so I would get wood and put it in a chipper and then a food
processor or blender and make a paste and lay it out on screens and dry it.
Then I could make dye from beets and paint that on with a feather for my
branding.
Getting into this locavore stuff, if I want to be hardcore,
and I do, I have to grow a lot of this stuff myself. I am trying to grow
soybeans and looking into growing quinoa, nuts like pistachios, wheat, hops,
sunflowers for oil etc. My husband and I are pretty do-it-your-selfer types
so making our own butter from local
cream, baking bread our own bread, cultivating yogurt, homemade beer, wine
using our neighbors grapes entirely… these are all things we do currently
before I even took up this challenge. But we could be doing more like making
our own cheese, buying all local ingredients, using less exotic spices and
making our own spices. I actually think it’s a lot of fun to challenge myself
in this way. It also helps out local farmers and businesses and undermines
major corporations who lobby the government for their special interests and I’m
all for that.
If it sounds hard, let me give a few ideas and resources to
lead you towards a more locavore way if it is of interest for Utahns.
www.utahsown.org - a comprehensive list of local businesses
http://eatlocalweek.org/resources/market-map
- list of Farmer’s Markets in the area
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/344/locavore.html
- Tips on becoming more local
Recipes
Cookbooks – you can seek these out at a local bookstore if
you are wanting to be super local!
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