Even in Winter, Eat Local – It’s Delicious

One of the keys to eating a healthy diet is eating regionally and seasonally as much as possible. The best choice is most often the one closest to home. Eating food from within your “100-mile foodshed will be the most nutritious and flavorful because it is picked closer to its peak. We can all shop and cook in ways that reflect a more local/regional, thoughtful approach, where we think in terms of eating food that has a sense of place rather than just about what’s available in our local grocery stores. Too often we buy globally. Produce, like strawberries, can come from Chile and be grown with cancer causing herbicides and pesticides. From an environmental standpoint, eating locally often means food with a smaller “carbon foot-print,” food that’s healthier and of course more delicious. If we all ate locally, global warming would be diminished, local communities would be strengthened and perhaps our children might even prefer fresh vegetables over “tater tots.”

That being said, eating locally and packing lunches made with local ingredients can be fun and delicious. In the San Francisco Bay area, there is a group called Locavores, whose mission is to educate around the paradigm of eating only foods grown or harvested within a 100 mile radius of San Francisco for an entire month. They recognize that the choices we all make about what foods we choose to eat are important politically, environmentally, economically, and healthfully and they have great guidelines for making these choices on their website, www.locavores.com. Some other resources for eating local www.localharvest.org, www.eatlocalchallenge.com, www.foodroutes.org, www.sustainabletable.org and www.eatwellguide.org. These websites have tips on where to find local food in your area, ideas for eating locally and recipes that help to creatively use all of the abundance that comes from eating with the seasons. Additional resources and inspiration can be found in the following books; “in Defense of Food,” Michael Pollan; “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” Barbara Kingsolver; “Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating From America’s Farmer’s Markets,” Deborah Madison and “Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasure and Politics of Local Food,” Gary Nabhan.

There are lots of websites that can help find local purveyors, but here are some tips that I think can help guide you. First off buy seasonal and local and the easiest way to begin is by shopping at farmer’s markets that have the farmer’s selling their own product, make sure you ask where their farm is and how far away they’re coming from. Even better than farmer’s markets, is visiting a local farm, buying from a farmstand or joining a CSA, a Community Supported Agriculture farm. When you can’t get to the farmer’s market or a local farm stand, support small grocery stores and Co-ops as opposed to huge mega-stores, and always ask where the food is coming from.

Ok, so that all sounds easy enough eat fresh seasonal local product, “no problem,” but what does it actually mean on your plate when you’re eating within a 100-mile foodshed. What it means, is that you make choices and sometimes they’re not easy ones. Let’s begin by agreeing that local and seasonal are our number one priority and that if we can’t find a product within our 100-mile foodshed, like coffee, that we’ll buy coffee that is organic and perhaps fair-trade and shade-grown. So the further from a local producer the product comes from, the more important certification of some kind becomes and certification often means more than just organic. I mentioned fair-trade, but you may also look for beef that’s been “grass-finished,” seafood that is “wild,” poultry that is “pastured” and pork and other products that are “heirloom” varieties. All of those types of labels can help guide you more delicious varieties grown by small family farmers and small producers and we need to give them our support. Not only that, but that same food from local producers is the safest possibly food you can eat and serve your family, food grown and produced by members of your extended community is food you can trust.

One of the joys of eating seasonally and locally is that the food truly tastes at its best; however this overabundance of flavor often comes with an overabundance of produce for a short time and then a long period of “drought.” This means that you might find beautiful fresh, local strawberries, peaches, tomatoes, corn or basil for a few short weeks of the year, and then they’re gone. My suggestion is that you buy as much of these as possible in season, eat your fill and then freeze, can, dry, pickle or preserve as much as you can to enjoy when the season is over. Another joy of eating locally, especially in the winter is finding and sharing recipes for unusual root vegetable, dark leafy greens and winter squashes that you might not otherwise cook. The books mentioned above and the following websites will help you eat happily while eating locally.

I hope your 100-mile meals are as delicious as they are community and environmentally oriented. For me as a chef, taste and flavor are of great import. We all know that there are four components of taste, sweet, sour, bitter, salty; but in the Japanese world, there’s a fifth, Umami. One of the definitions of Umami that I like best, is that it’s eating an item at its peak, at the height of its deliciousness and that’s what eating a local diet can become. Eating food that is not only at its delicious perfection, but food that is supporting your community and our planet for our children.

For more information on eating locally:

• www.locavores.com
• www.localharvest.org
• www.slowfood.org
• www.thefoodproject.org
• www.eatlocalchallenge.com
• www.foodroutes.org
• www.sustainabletable.org
• www.eatwellguide.org