Friday, February 5, 2010
The Food Challenge
Last night, my boyfriend and I went to a friends house for pasta dinner. Now the polite thing to do is bring a bottle of wine. I stopped at a wine/beer shop in Belmont on my way home from work yesterday. I decided to try my food challenge project out. Browsing around I saw wines from all over the world. The closest wine I could find was made in CA. I asked the clerk if there were any local wines..He laughed at me and asked if I had seen any Vineyards around here. (In my head I'm thinking.. Martha's Vineyard. duh. Look at a map son.) When I lived in Nantucket I lived near a brewery, winery, distillery, so yes I know they make wine in our fine state. Frustrated I ended up buying Cisco brewery whale's tale beer. They only come in 4 packs. $8.49 for 4 beers. But hey its only 99.2 miles to Nantucket from my house. So it was kind of weird for one person each to have one beer, luckily my friends had wine at their house to have with dinner, while we each enjoyed a "local" beer before dinner.
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It's much easier to get local beer, isn't it? But then again, where do the yeast, hops, etc. come from? I have no clue where these things are grown. I think we are starting to hit on a key idea (Dominica's entry raised this same point for me): the difference between locally produced food and locally grown food. Most prepared food products (except for small-scale local producers) probably contain ingredients from far, far away. Of course, how can we know this for sure? And how far do we take this emphasis on "local?" Thoughts?
ReplyDeleteMaybe we should take it as far as we can? Just to see what happens...
ReplyDeleteI have been seriously eating local food for about five years now and I've yo-yo'd up and down on the scale of what's local and how much of my diet should be local. Because I tend to take my ideologies and run with them, I have tried to take it to the extreme, denying myself certain things if I can't find them locally grown, feeling bad if I "slipped" and ate something outside my definition.
I finally realized I didn't have to beat myself up over this, but that the point was not to ensure that every scrap entering my mouth had been grown in my area, rather that I take the time to *think* about the source of my food in the first place. The awareness is the important part.
In our current system, it would be very difficult (if not downright impossible) for an urban dweller to get a fully nutritious diet out of products grown within 150 miles. But, going along with our conversation about supporting "transition" technology, it's essential that we make the effort in order to see the holes in the system. Then we can work on making it better! That quote we were trying to think of at Greenward--"Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."
So...I think we should struggle to eat as locally as possible, try to learn as much as we can from it, and then think of solutions for the "impossibilities."
Let me just say I am currently in awe of Brynn. I do realize that hindsight is 20/20, but let me just say to the rest of you that might have children one day, these changes are easier to make pre-kids. Or more specifically, pre-finger food kids.
ReplyDeleteI am trying, though.