Lisa and I have been canning food for several seasons. Last year was by far the biggest and best with about 800 lbs stored. We had Hart from FoodTV on hand to film what we called Fruitapolooza 08 and Food TV called: Preserving Summer.
Our motivations are twelve-fold:
Read the complete Post.
We have canned the last of the harvest this year, and what a harvest it has been: peaches,
pears, tomatoes, beets and finally apples (the last still yet to finish dehydrating). I have learned how incredible it is to eat food when it is in season and produced by local farmers, and how satisfying it is to harvest food right out of our garden and onto our plates.
If there is one single influence that I can credit my new found compulsion to eat local, in season food, it would be Barbara Kingsolver’s book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle“. In her book she and her family describe their experience as homesteaders making the commitment to eat locally for one full year. Aside from inspiring words, she includes fabulous recipes including the tomato sauce recipe I canned this year. This quote from the bottom of page thirty one, describes exactly what it is like to eat out of season food.
The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local food-culture is not the price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint - virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes) will they know its true value. “Blah blah blah,” hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can’t even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires.
How, after reading that, can one go on to eat wilted asperagus at Thanksgiving, or apples
in the middle of June? The honest truth is that out of season food flown, shipped or driven from all over the continent arrives on my plate tasting like crap. It is normally pumped full of who knows what’s DNA so that it at least resembles what its in season counterpart looks like. Why would I want that in my body! I don’t want my children to grow up in this new pattern of seasonal disorientation. I resolve to know what I’m missing - who grows when and how to cook it.
I’ve included a photo of our full pantry - read the book, get inspired to eat a little closer to the season.
Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon have popularized eating local and are credited with the 100 Mile Diet phenomena currently sweeping through North America. Having spent an entire year eating food that was grown within 100 miles of their home on the West Coast, they have created a quiet movement that is sweeping through Canada and the US. They deserve much credit for their commitment, perseverance and desire to educate the masses about our industrialized agriculture system. If you like reading, you can check out their book: The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating
As our harvest is coming in with varying degrees of success, we are planting our winter crops and planning next year’s season. We have been inspired by the bounty that we have been able to cultivate and forage within our immediate neighborhood and would like to build on James and Alisa’s success. It’s time to raise the bar with a new challenge: The One Mile Diet: A Lifetime of Extremely Local Eating. This isn’t something that can be done cold turkey and we may never reach the goal in entirely but it is the direction we choose to direct our life’s energy for the foreseeable future. It will be a process of incremental improvement, innovation, community involvement and lots of time in the garden! Stay Tuned!