Locavorism update

One of the things I was doing while not blogging of late, in addition to taking vacations and re-starting the book, was the continued pursued of locavorism. Many aspects of this way of life have now become habit - the farmer's market, bread-baking, using honey instead of sugar. The juice and the milk that we buy has the added benefit of coming in returnable glass bottles (the old deposit system), which adds the satisfaction of reducing our waste. I know, glass is recyclable, but the world can only absorb so much recycled glass.

One thing that didn't go so smoothly was my quest for canning tomatoes. Because we had The Summer That Wasn't here in the Northwest, the tomato crop was rather sad, and in particular, there was a near-complete absence of canning varieties. That would be the meaty ones, the Romas and San Marzanos and such.

I had in my head that I would attempt to put up some of the foods that would not otherwise be available in winter, rather than import them from California or Mexico. I canned 12 pints of cherries and four quarts of peaches. I roasted and froze five pounds of peppers, blanched and froze a couple pound of green beans. I purchased, and have stored in neat glass storage jars, two quarts each of dry kidney, red, black and garbanzo beans.

But the tomatoes proved elusive. Week after week I would ask around at the farmer's market, even visiting other markets. People had a few canners here and there, but not enough to make it worth the effort. Twice I received an absolute promise that they'd be there the next week, at another market...only to be disappointed.

Finally I saw a box of decent-sized Romas at one stand in the U District. I bought their whole stock - 20 pounds, at a 10 percent discount. I brought them home and cleaned them, skinned them (after a quick dip in boiling water), and then hot-packed and canned them in quart jars.

How many quarts do you get from 20 pounds of raw tomatoes? Ten. I might have canned more the next weekend if I could've found them, but alas. Nothing but slicers and cherries to be had. And yellow tomatoes, which aren't acidic enough to can safely.

One interesting thing about the locavore experiment is thinking about what really is better for the environment. So: growing summer produce year-round using greenhouses and irrigation, and then trucking it all over the country, uses an unsustainable amount of energy and water. Fine. What was required to produce my ten quarts of canned tomatoes?

I bought them from a local organic farmer. Good. They cost me $55 - that's $5.50 per quart, just to start. Then there's the cost of the jars, which I'm not really counting because they're reusable, though the flat part of the two-piece lid can't be re-used for canning purposes. So add a few cents for that. Then there was the lemon juice needed to ensure a safe level of acidity (tomatoes being right on the PH bubble, in terms of being inhospitable to botulism). And then lots of boiling water: the initial boil to loosen the skin, the boiling water to fill up the jars, and enough to fill a 20-quart canning kettle. Lastly, there's the electricity to run the stove, bringing the kettle to boil and keeping it there through two 45-minute rounds of canning. Theoretically you could throw in the value of my time, about four hours total for the canning process, but we'll ignore that since I don't have a billable rate for canning.

Conservatively, we're talking $6 to $7 per quart of tomatoes.

That's not totally outrageous, but it's not cheap either. It probably still produced fewer carbon emissions than the fresh tomatoes shipped up from Mexico in the middle of winter. (Though to some extent that turns on the electricity that powers my stove, which happens to come from greener wind and hydro sources in this neck of the woods...still more complexity.) So, I'm doing better eating these than eating fresh this winter. But how do my canners compare to other canned tomatoes I might buy, industrially canned and shipped in bulk from ... somewhere?

Well, I don't know where exactly the store-bought canned tomatoes come from. If it were Oregon or California, that might still be a better deal than home-canning, carbon-wise, but maybe not Florida.

I have ten empty quart jars left, and would consider doing some more canning before the season ends but I'm not sure I have the time. I'm out of town the next two weekends. And I'm only really committed to it for things that I legitimately can't get fresh and local in winter. The best fruit for canning right now is pears, and we'll be able to get Washington-grown pears that are cold-stored all winter.

If anybody out there has 20 more pounds of San Marzano tomatoes, though, let me know.

More Aloha

Yesterday, we went to the Bishop Museum where we learned about the rich, vibrant culture of the Hawaiians and how their government was overthrown by the Dole Corporation. Poor Queen Lili'uokalani. We also learned about the two kinds of hula, the origin of the ukelele, and the three social structures within Polynesian cultures. Moxie took a horseback ride and saw sea turtles.

Today we ate shrimp from a shack 20 feet away from where the shrimp were harvested. We also drank coconut juice directly out of the shell:

Plus there has been so much tropical fruit, oh good golly, the fruit! I had been so sick of the berries, and here I've been eating pineapple, guava, passionfruit, papaya...Then there's fish, chicken, pork, rice (is that still grown here?), tomatoes, sweet corn, Hawaiian onions, and sea asparagus. I'm ordering wine from Australia and New Zealand, since I figure this is a close as it's ever going to get to local.

Keep visiting Flickr for more photos.

Locavorism update

We are 13 days into our one-month locavore challenge, although I'd been preparing ahead before we started. To review, our particular locavore challenge is: Washington state grown only in July, with two exemptions, olive oil and coffee. We are also not counting basic dry-good ingredients such as salt, yeast, baking soda & powder, and spices.I figured out where to buy things, ordered Washington-wheat flour from Winthrop, and started practicing my bread-baking skills.

Here are some things I’ve learned so far.

Lesson #1 - This isn't bad at all. There's lots of great stuff to eat from Washington state. The farmers markets offer a wealth of produce, we can bake our own baked goods, use honey instead of sugar, and eat plenty of meat, eggs and dairy for protein.

Lesson #2 - BUT: It would be completely impossible without farmers markets, and the family-run butcher shop in our neighborhood. If we were relying on the local grocery stores - even the ones, like PCC and Whole Foods, that claim to support locally produced food - we'd have no produce whatsoever, and a limited amount of meat and dairy.

Lesson #3 - I do not much care for okra. And that's all I'll say about that.

Lesson #4 - The perniciousness of sugar and salt: Eating whole foods cooked from scratch reveals just how much sugar and salt we generally eat. Having eliminated sugar, I am going through a 16-ounce jar of honey per week. That includes sweetening my morning coffee every day, as well as up to ¼ cup of honey every time I bake bread. I’d probably be using more in the winter, when we wouldn’t have the sweetness of fresh fruit. Similarly, having eliminated all processed foods I’m really aware of how much less salt we’re eating.

Lesson#5 - Good meat is...good! Though historically leaning vegetarian, we’ve been buying high-quality meat from our neighborhood meat market, and I’ve taken to cooking with bacon – good, thick, juicy bacon. I now understand why it has been prized, historically, not only for its keeping power but for the flavor (and salt!) that it adds.

Lesson #6 - Baking bread is fun! I’m baking two to three loaves per week. From start to finish, elapsed time is about 4 hours with two rising periods, a bit more with three rising periods, which makes a much lighter bread. I’m getting the hang of it, and I find the old saying is true: kneading bread is soothing. We’ve also tried wheat tortillas once, which were a little heavy but very easy to make, so we’ll do that again soon and hopefully improve. I tried cookies today for the first time - hazelnut shortbread thinghies with whey powder and honey instead of sugar.

Lesson #7 - I haven’t been appreciating juice enough. This month we’ve been relying on the very excellent apple juice from Rockridge Orchards, available at our farmers’ market for a whopping $7 per half-gallon. To supplement, I bought a steam juicer and was able to create a very lovely, if rather tart, half-gallon of juice. Using FIVE POUNDS of fruit. Clearly, I have been taking my juice for granted. And by the way, the steam juicer leaves behind a lovely fruit mush which, with honey and some cider vinegar as preservative, makes a great compote for toast or yogurt. Which leads me to...

Lesson #8 - Making yogurt is easy, boiling milk is a pain in the neck: I’ve found all dairy products available locally except for yogurt, for some reason. But I’d heard that yogurt is easy to make. All you need is a quart of milk, and ½ cup of yogurt, to make another quart of yogurt. I'm only about 50-50 on yogurt success so far, for some reason. Unlike bread, this is not something I see myself making from scratch in the long run.

Lesson #9 - Bring back Home Ec! I hit middle & high school in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, when the feminist revolution had exposed the sexism of offering home economics to girls and shop to boys. As a result, we got neither. I didn’t miss it at the time, but now I’m realizing how little I know about the basics of food preparation and preservation. Every week I find myself asking remedial questions like: What’s the difference between blanching and parboiling? Does buttermilk keep longer than regular milk, and if so why? Is it better to freeze berries or can them? Why doesn’t whole wheat rise as well as white? I hope these days young people are getting some kind of education on food.

Lesson #10 - A gal's got to have chocolate on her birthday: Today happens to be my birthday, and we cheated for the first time. We bought Halibut flown in from Alaska, and some Tillamook Udderly Chocolate ice cream. Mmmmm....

That's the rundown so far. Enrico isn't as enthused about this process as I am, but he's gone with the program so far. I think he misses corn chips most of all. A friend who's a lifelong Washington resident told us he thinks one of the Native tribes grows corn and makes cornmeal, so perhaps that's available after all; more research is in order!

Locavorism: Week 1

We are four days into our real experiment with locavorism. As I mentioned, it seemed like we were already well underway because I'd been researching food sources, stocking up, and practicing recipes for the things we'd need to prepare from scratch.

The diversity of produce available at the farmers markets expanded greatly just this week. I even have tomatoes - tomatoes! They are hothouse, but very local.

Here are some things I've learned.

Although local dairy products are not a problem, the one thing I haven't found is yogurt. We can get yogurt from Oregon cows, or California, but not Washington. But my trusty book* told me that yogurt is very easy to make. All you need is milk and...more yogurt. I tried my first batch this week, and it was a flop. It separated into liquid whey and, well, whatever else there is in milk when you take out the whey.

Upon re-reading the instructions, I noticed the firm admonition to only use very fresh ingredients. Since I'd scraped the bottom of a yogurt tub that had been open for two weeks to get my yogurt starter, I figured this was my problem. So I tried again, and this time it came out beautifully. It is indeed very simple, except for the fact that you have to heat the milk to boiling, and of course that takes some care. Then you have to let it cool to a very precise temperature before putting in the starter yogurt. So it doesn't take a lot of work, but it takes a lot of attention while you're doing it.

So, add yogurt-making to bread-baking, steam-juicing and canning, on my list of newly developed skills.

Speaking of juicing, I finally managed to extract a full half-gallon jug of juice. It took somewhere between 4 and 5 pounds of fruit.

Meanwhile, our strawberry patch is going nuts, producing way more strawberries than we can keep up with. I have no desire to freeze the excess since local frozen berries of all kinds are abundantly available here in winter. So I decided to take a bunch to our friends on 4th of July, as part of our food contribution. The strawberries were so ripe that I didn't think they'd keep even two more days, so I cooked them down slightly with some honey and a bit of (local) apple cider vinegar. I'll bake a loaf of fresh bread, too, and probably take the juice.

So behold the fruits of my recent labor: yogurt; strawberry sauce; and a jug of aprium / apple/ strawberry juice:


* Stocking Up, by Carol Hupping, which covers things like canning, drying, freezing, making dairy products, baking bread, preserving meat and - I kid you not - storing food underground for the winter. It's like a pioneer woman's survival guide.

In other news: Farming is hard

A couple of weeks ago I saw this article in the paper, about a church group that has started a small farm with the goal of developing a farmers market in the Central Area of Seattle, one of the few neighborhoods that does not yet have a market. It's also the predominantly African-American part of town, and so the organizers of this effort also want to do it in a way that will keep the business dollars in the black community. Unfortunately, for various reasons they were going to have to move their plant starts to a new farm location, and were calling for volunteers to help re-plant.

So we headed down there on a Saturday morning, and spent about four hours helping out. There were probably a couple dozen people from the church, and maybe 75 additional random volunteers like us. Some of the plant starts were still in trays, but others had been pulled from the ground and were heaped in buckets. These latter needed to be replanted very quickly, before disintegrating into green goo, like the old lettuce at the bottom of the plastic bag. I mostly planted, and Enrico mostly hauled bucket after bucket of fertilizer (manure) to the newly turned beds.

After four hours, my legs hurt so badly from squatting, I was pretty sure I'd be walking like a duck forever. My lower back was screaming. When we got home, Enrico did not even make it into the house before falling asleep...in the back yard. He literally couldn't get through the door without sleeping. The only thing that got me in the house was the desire to shower the manure off. After just four hours. This is how hard it is to be a farmer. I am that much more appreciative of these people now every time I go to the farmers market.

The dogs were appreciative that Enrico was acting like a proper dog and lounging in the grass with them. Finally! they said, you are getting with the program around here. And the smell of manure was a big plus, too.

Locavorism: Pre-week I

With the month of locavorism officially beginning in four days, we have done a great deal of prep research and practice. Although I've only committed to pure locavorism for a month, I fully expect many of our eating habits to change for the long term. Like my pioneer forebears, I now see food transported from a long way away as a luxury item. I hope to eat things like mangoes, or Italian cheese, with full awareness of how far they travel to get here, and the unseen petroleum cost I pay each time I eat one. I hope to be more intentional about when that premium is really worth something to me, and when it isn't.

So it's cherry season here in Washington, and we are swimming in luscious, delicious cherries. But cherry season passes in a flash. One week it's Chelans, then the next week Rainiers, and then Bings. Thinking about the long winter and spring, ahead with no fresh fruit - it'll be all luxury items from October to June, except for the cold-stored apples and pears which grow blander as the months pass - I decided to can some cherries, to have a local fruit treat available for the winter.

Now I've only canned for freezing before, so I first spent time reading up on water bath canning (which is sufficient for fruits, all too acidic to spawn botulism), and purchased a 21-quart canning pot along with fresh jar lids. My first batch were the lovely golden Rainiers - because whoosh, the Chelans were done already! - and I canned about 2 pounds, which produced four pretty pint jars:

On the same day, I finally mastered a decent buttermilk honey wheat bread, too:

Buoyed by my success, I bought an extra couple pounds of Bings the next week at the farmers market, richly red, and set up for more canning. I had also purchased a steam juicer, so I came home with a pound of "apriums" - a cross between apricots and plums. Canning takes so much water - most of it hot - to heat and sterilize the cans and lids, to clean and soak the fruit, to prepare boiling syrup, and to immerse the cans in boiling water for (in the case of cherries) a full 25 minutes. So I figured, I might as well do the steam juicing right after the canning, to re-use some of that boiling water.

Alas, this time all did not go as smoothly. I overfilled the jars, and they overflowed during canning, which means the seals cannot be considered reliable. One jar did not seal at all, so I chopped those cherries up and put them in with some applesauce I'd made with last year's cold-stored apples. As I poured those cherries into a colander, I kicked myself for letting all that beautiful, thick cherry syrup go down the drain. Two jars were sealed but I could tell they'd boiled over during canning, so I froze them just in case. (Little bits of food under the seal can be enough to cultivate unwanted organisms.) Only one looked like a clean seal.

On to the juicer, then. My pound of apriums, supplemented by some strawberries from the garden, produced less than a quart of juice. I regretted the squandered cherry syrup even more. The juice was bitter, but good - more like lemonade - and delicious with a bit of honey. More attentive to waste now, I scraped the remaining fruit oodge from the steamer, and added some honey to make a fruit compote for yogurt.

Apart from learning how much water goes into canning, and the importance of respecting jar head space, I am learning other things from this. First, now that I am putting more thought and work into obtaining my food, I eat smaller portions. It takes more work to get the food, so I think hard about how I'm going to use it. Plus, I rarely cook more than we need to eat, because the fresh food tastes so good.

Second, I have deeper respect for the skills of the pioneer or peasant woman who had to think through what she had, how she could use it, and what she might or might not have on hand later. Slowly, I am getting the pioneer spirit: waste not, want not. When the only fruit available is mealy, cold-stored apples from last fall, you make applesauce. If the seal on your canned cherries fails, you throw them in with the applesauce, and retain the syrup for something else. A little bit of high-quality bacon adds a lot of flavor to those nutritious collard greens. And juice - good heavens! The amount of fruit and energy required to make a glass of juice! Talk about a luxury.

When reading my great-great-aunt Lou's diary, I noticed the attention she paid to what she ate. In the winter in Winnipeg, she would comment when they opened a can of cherries for a treat. She commented on how many pickles she ate with tea, and the joys of a lovely fresh salad in summer. I think I'm beginning to understand why those things deserved valuable space in the single-page daily entries of her journal - writing space being carefully rationed, just like everything else.

Why am I doing this? Partly, it has piqued my curiosity. Partly, I am committed to eating local most of the time, and that means stocking up now for winter. And partly - I must confess - I see the deepening economic clouds, which seem frighteningly close to moving us from simple recession to true depression, and I think - it can't hurt to learn these skills now. Who knows when I might need them. Maybe that's crazy, but I just can't shake the feeling.

Preparing to Go Locavore

The day is quickly approaching when Enrico and I will start our one-month experiment with (almost) pure locavorism. Locavore is the term coined for people who emphasize eating local. It was the Word of the Year last year for the Oxford American Dictionary (following the related "carbon neutral" in 2006), and the concept was further popularized this year by the publication of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Locavorism is becoming increasingly popular, even mainstream. Why? Well, a variety of reasons:

• the 1,500 mile distance that the average meal travels to our plate (emitting carbon dioxide all the way)
• the dependence of large-scale industrial farming on petroleum, toxic chemicals and antibiotics
  
• the nutritional superiority of fresher food
• loss of genetic diversity in our produce and livestock
• the genetic freakishness and miserable existence of lifestock animals, e.g. turkeys genetically modified to have such big breasts that they literally topple over if they try to stand up - which they can't do anyway, since they're packed into cages that don't allow them to move.

All of these things are concerns for me too, and so we've been preparing to make July Locavore Month.

Because I needed to do some research into where we would find various food items, in fact we are well on our way to locavorism already. I've been hitting the farmer's market every week, just like last summer, and oh! the beautiful, tasty produce. One big revelation is meat. Though we have been largely vegetarian for years, that was not about a moral objection to flesh-eating, but rather about all the things noted above, the unsustainability and unseemliness of meat production in this country. But buying some beef from a happy, field-raised cow or chicken grown by a friendly farmer nearby feels different, and possibly a better ethical choice than tofu made from industrially produced soybeans.

So I finally stopped in the local meat market in our neighborhood, Bob's Quality Meats - and why have I never done this before? The proprietor is a third-generation butcher, getting his meat from ranchers in Eastern Washington who supplied his father (the eponymous Bob) and grandfather before him. None of the meat comes from feed lots, and most of it is organically fed (though he was quick to explain that "organic" can only apply to the grain that's fed to the animals, since you can't control the grass; plus, chickens are omnivores). I bought chicken! and bacon - oh my god, real bacon. It's a revelation, really. Next time I'm going to try some of their sausages, made on-site.

So what's a locavore to eat? Happily, we live in a place that provides a lot. We've chosen Washington state as our foodshed for this exercise (as opposed to the more restrictive 100-Mile Diet).

• So far, I have identified sources for: vegetables, fruits, milk and cheese (butter is proving elusive, but I'm optimistic it will turn up), eggs, honey, jam, pickles, vinegar, wheat flour (I'm particularly proud of my find on that one), rye and emmer flour, beans, lentils, wine, beer, seltzer, and juice (though we're going to pay through the nose for that, and it's going to be apple, apple, and more apple). We're practicing baking our own bread, and plan to give flour tortillas a whirl soon, maybe even pasta. We may have to make our own ice cream.
  
• Items likely to be off the menu, unless something unexpected turns up, include: sugar, molasses, all corn products other than fresh ears, citrus fruits, bananas, avocados, tea, most nuts (including peanuts), olives (ouch!), balsamic vinegar (double ouch!) and pomegranites.
  
• Items that are still unclear - the search continues - include tofu, at least some form of nuts, and grapes (lots are grown in this state, but likely only for wine). And seafood - what constitutes a locally caught fish? Something will, but my test here is transport/carbon emissions - so we clearly don't eat Alaskan salmon, even one caught by a Seattle fisherman. Shellfish are probably easier.
  
• Amazingly enough, pre-processed foods are not necessarily off our list - there's a place in town, Eat Local, that has pre-made meals and desserts made entirely of local ingredients.
  
• Exemptions: We're exempting light-weight base ingredients like salt, baking soda, baking powder, yeast, and most spices (though we'll use fresh herbs as much as possible). I figure, people have transported spices for a long time, and I don't think that's going to break the Carbon Emissions Bank. We're also each giving ourselves two additional exemptions, and I am choosing coffee and olive oil - though the oil will come from California rather than Europe. Enrico is leaning towards olive oil and chocolate.
  

Part of what I'm coming to appreciate too is that we've not only lost touch with where our food comes from and how it's grown, but also basic cooking and preserving skills that were a matter of survival and good eating for milennia. I can't tell you how many times I've arrived home from the farmer's market with something and thought, huh. I wonder how you cook that? So I'm thinking I might follow up Locavore July with a focus on preparing and preserving food in August - making cheese and yougurt, juicing, canning, drying, etc.

For those interested in playing along - join us this summer!

Updates from a really crappy blogger

It's true, I don't seem to have the same drive to blog lately. Maybe it's because my life just isn't that interesting. Maybe, over a three year span, I have basically expressed every opinion, musing, and soap box tirade in my repertoire, and I have nothing left to offer. Maybe I spend too much time sitting at the computer. Maybe the evolving nature of my professional life has made too many of life's funny stories off-limits as blogging potential. I would try to explain that last one, but I can't think of a way to do so without revealing that which must be kept off-limits if I want to keep working in this town. Plus there are some professional ethics involved. Stupid ethics.

But here are a few things I can report.

On Sunday, I will be standing up in front of the largest crowd I've ever spoken before, upwards of 2,000 people. Including the governor, the speaker of the (state) house, and the senate majority leader. I was chosen to pinch hit for somebody else, because the organizers of this event have decided that I'm the sort of person who can be asked at the last minute to stand up in front of a bunch of people, deliver a serviceable if not terribly dynamic spiel, and not freak out. We'll see if they're right. Let's hope so. Because I don't really have time to complete a Toastmasters course before then.

Things to do before Sunday: Pick out some clean clothes. Rehearse script. Shave legs.

Enrico's thumb is growing back. Thanks for asking!

And, I have decided (and Enrico has agreed) that we will try a variant of the 100-Mile Diet for the month of July. Our variant will actually be a Washington state diet, with two key exceptions: coffee and olive oil, those twin elixirs of life! I just received a shipment of flour that I ordered from what appears to be the only producers of flour from wheat grown in Washington, so we can make our own bread and pasta for the month. I'm going to have to give up sugar, but at least our state makes plenty of honey. And thank HEAVENS, lots of alcoholic beverages. I'm planning a field trip to a farm that produces open-range meat, dairy and eggs. If anybody knows of a source of lentils and dried beans grown in Washington, please, let me know. Washington state is supposedly the biggest producer of lentils in the country - they grow 'em by the bucket out in the Pelouse - but damn if I can figure out how to know whether I'm buying local.

Miscellaneous shellfish

The car is in the body shop. We have a sporty rental car that I dislike, but whatever. The front door to the house has been fixed, both windows replaced with double-paned windshield-quality glass that will shatter but not break if anyone tries to bust it in again. The contractor was late and his carpentry work is not nearly the quality of the people who did our back door and our windows last fall, but that's ok. It makes me appreciative of the other guys' craftsmanship rather than disappointed in this work.

I went to LA on business and came back, and it was ok. I wasn't really in the mood for either the trip or for facilitating a day-long meeting, but it went fine. After having a snit about the airplane ride, my back is feeling much better, all of a sudden.

At the airport I bought Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, which I devoured and loved. I was already on the local food bandwagon - agriculture consumes nearly 20% of our fossil fuels in this country, three-fourths of which is for transporting the food after harvest. But reading this book nudged me down this path a little further, and on Wednesday when my brain was too dead to work I spent the day asking the Internet various questions about my local food options. I learned many interesting things - like two-thirds of the country's lentil production happens just east of here, and yet I can buy none of these lentils at my local markets. Or that many of the organic food companies I rely on have actually been bought out by large corporations (e.g. Cascadian Farms, Odwalla, Muir Glen) - not sure if that's good or bad, but it's news to me.

I'm sure I'll share more on this later, in that overly earnest way I have when I've recently had a moment of clarity on some new subject. Suffice to say that Ms. Kingsolver makes it seem a very joyous thing to re-connect with where your food comes from, and not a deprivation. I learned that making cheese is actually pretty easy. I am reconsidering my position on meat, concluding that a locally raised free-range turkey is probably a more ethical food choice than tofu from petro-thirsty soybean mega-farms using genetically engineered seed. I can no longer look at a banana without seeing a luxury item, and I'm ok with that.

I made another trip to the pawn shop in search of my wedding ring. I do not like that place, Sam I Am.

We are trying to finalize travel plans to France, which is behind schedule and therefore stressful. But I have faith that it will all work out.

I think I'm coming down with a cold. Tomorrow we have symphony tickets. Monday we are planning to see the Oscar-nominated shorts. I think that about brings things up to date.

The Ethics of Food, Part II

I have been thinking a lot more concretely about the challenge of sustainable living, partly because of the general increase in chatter about climate change, partly because a committed group of people at my church are pushing us all to really, really think about how we are living the UU 's Seventh Principle ("Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part"). My recent increased reflection is not at all due to those stupid concerts last month, however. Those were just lame.

We're pretty environmentally conscious folk, Enrico and I, but my thinking has been pushed quite a bit by joining a CSA, Community Supported Agriculture, where you buy a "share" of food for the season from a local farm. We have a half-share each of vegetables, fruit and eggs, which we pick up at our neighborhood farmer's market every Wednesday. (This particular farm also sells meat, and we have gleefully entertained the thought of buying a half hog for the dogs, but alas, we'd have nowhere to store it.)

This all came about because the aforementioned church group was educating us on the enormous amount of fossil fuels consumed just by shipping food. Plus there have been a couple of books recently written by people who have experimented with a strictly local or organic lifestyle, mostly notably Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by the illustrious Barbara Kingsolver. There's a group that challenges people to spend one month living on the "100-Mile Diet," a diet of things produced within 100 miles (local variants include the 150-mile diet and the Washington state diet, which for Seattelites open up considerable fruit, grain and dairy options from east of the Cascades). We're tempted to give it a try, and there's a local organization sponsoring a Seattle effort; their Web site provides tips on where to find specific foods, restaurants that would meet the rules, etc. Of course, I would have to give myself at least one major exception: Coffee.

Meanwhile, this growing awareness of ethical choices in consumption are in my mind every time I buy something. My love affair with Trader Joe's has faded, as I simply cannot bring myself to buy their frozen pizzas any more, imported from Italy. I just don't need to burn that many fossil fuels for a frozen pizza. Sometimes, the choices seem complicated. When you're at the grocery store, how do you trade off organic versus local versus recyclable packaging? Our wooden patio furniture is losing its finish from our wet summer; is it more ethical to paint it with nasty chemicals to preserve it longer, or let it rot faster and consume more wood furniture over the years? Is it better to live in a dense urban area, relying on mass transit and remote food sources, or take up a fat plot of land in the country where you grow your own food but drive a lot? And it's hard to know how significant some of these measures are. I've been skipping my shower on laundry day, to balance the hot water consumption - if everybody did that, what kind of difference would it make?

And yes, I know you can assuage your conscience by paying into a "carbon offset" fund (e.g. you pay someone to invest in a renewable technology that exactly offsets the amount of carbon emissions you generate by, say, flying to visit your sister) - but that seems fishy to me. My carbon has still been emitted, right?

Perhaps the biggest question comes around cost. I used to think that "frugal" living was part of the solution, on the theory that materialism drives overconsumption as well as socioeconomic disparities. When I took a break from work a few years ago, I was a master a bargain-hunting. But many of those bargains break all the sustainability rules - the organic stuff is always more expensive, and the cheapest goods are made in China which, politics aside, require a lot of fossil fuels to arrive at my doorstep. I've been trying to buy local cheese and man, that can be really expensive. Is the sustainable lifestyle inherently elitist? Or is it incumbent on those of us with the financial means to pay the sustainable living premium? In the long run, would this create better and more efficient markets that are financially accessible to more people? Perhaps this is the true cost of living on Earth, but tell that to someone trying to raise a family in Seattle on minimum wage.

Anyway, this is long and rambling, but that's how the whole thing feels. We'd like to craft a life that's in balance with the Earth, but it's a complicated business.

The politics of food

For a long time, I appreciated the importance of organic food, but I was still resentful about how much more expensive everything is at my local "co-op" (it really isn't a co-op, they don't even check your card any more). Trader Joe's has a fair amount of organic stuff, often at a fraction of the price. And the laundry detergent - what's up with that? Why is it literally three times the cost for the same product?

But for some reason recently I have accepted the inescapable morality of my food choices, and begun to try to buy not only organic, but local. The United States has 5% of the world's population, but produces 21% of the carbon emissions. A quarter of our emissions come from our agricultural system, including transporting our food, while ironically, global climate change is projected to put an additional 75 to 125 million people at risk of chronic hunger, due to drought and other disruptions to food production systems. (Citations for these factoids available upon request.)

I happen to live in a place where I could more or less eat locally produced vegetables all year. Granted, if I wanted to be a purist about it, I'd be eating onions and cabbage and beets in the winter, but hey, that's pretty much just going back to my ethnic roots. It would be much tougher in the Midwest.

So lately I have been trying to at least reduce the travel distance of my produce, buying things grown in Washington or even Oregon and BC whenever possible. I can't bring myself to give up peppers, bananas or coffee, which will always have high transport costs, and citrus fruit would be a tough one too. It's not just produce, either - our sojourn in Italy gave us a love of Italian cheeses, and I have yet to find the perfect local artisan pecorino. But I'll keep trying.

I've found that this approach has changed the way I shop and cook. I have in fact become more European, stopping by the store every couple of days and picking my meals based on what looks good at the store. Self-help books on reducing your cost of living will tell you this is a terrible way to live - you should plan your menus out a week in advance, so you can know where to shop cheaply and buy just what you need. I've always been overwhelmed by this advice, and I went through a long period of hating the grocery store. But I have been enjoying myself, selecting the best-looking, most local organic produce I can find, and then figuring out what to do with it while it's still fresh. I've developed an absolute love for collard greens and savoy cabbage!