Going local

January 29, 2007

(continued from page 1)

“We can muddle through with the other problems we’ll have when peak oil arrives — getting to work, keeping our houses warm, keeping the lights on — but we can’t tell people to wait a few months to eat while we change our whole agricultural system,” she says.

Shopping at the University District farmers’ market in Seattle.

Before spending last May doing the Bay Area-based Eat Local Challenge, engineer Marc Rumminger says he hadn’t really connected the dots between his diet and his occupation. “My day job is working on equipment that takes things from the source to the market,” says Rumminger, who lives in Berkeley, California. Because he works with engines, Rumminger says, he has an intimate understanding of both “food miles” (the distance food travels from origin to consumption) and of the environmental effects of industrial ports (water, land, and air pollution).

Unlike Nechamen, who says she never felt the need to shop at her local food co-op before September, Marc Rumminger is a man who has always spent time thinking about, shopping for, and crafting his meals. Eating locally, he says, didn’t necessarily demand much extra time or thought. But he’s expanded his shopping habits to include visits to local farms, closer inspection of food labels, and awareness of what does and does not grow in his home state.

A private-label olive-oil he found at a local store, for instance, sourced its olives from both California and Tunisia. But Rumminger also learned that he could buy rice grown in the Sacramento Valley, about 100 miles away. And he noticed things he might never have thought to buy at the farmers’ market before, like a local flour that was too soft to bake with but perfect for thickening sauces. He also researched the exotic fringes of California agriculture, finding farms growing mangoes, bananas, even papayas that never ripen. The papayas go to Thai restaurants, where they’re shredded for green-papaya salad, a dish Rumminger calls “one of the best salads in the world.”

Peppers at the farmers’ market in Portland, Oregon.

More than six months after participating in the month-long Bay Area Eat Local Challenge, Rumminger estimates that half of his diet is locally produced. “I hope to help create a new kind of mindfulness around eating,” he says.

Critics of the eat-local movement often charge that eating locally is easy in California, but not so simple in, say, Alberta. Still, Nechamen’s Albany challenge, for example, had more than 75 participants, and similar projects have sprouted in such locations as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. And among the 700 people who signed up to participate last May via the Bay Area-based EatLocalChallenge.com, more than half hailed from such distant locations as the Midwest and New England.

In northern Maryland, Sarah Irani organized a version of the challenge that involved hosting farmer talks and a local-food potluck. “I’ve found that the most powerful thing has been changing my own life,” says the 29-year-old artist and teacher. “People come over for dinner, or I talk to them at church. And you don’t really feel the effect right away, but that’s kind of how culture changes. It’s gradual.”

Advertisement

Irani has been interested in local and organic food since college, when she consulted a naturopath for medical problems. Her diet today, she says, consists of 70 to 80 percent local foods. “Every now and again, I’ll buy some bananas, or I’ll use some Indian spices to cook with,” she admits. “I’m not going to be totally hardnosed about it, because trade has brought some really great things.” People who set themselves up to eat only local foods all the time, she worries, are much less likely to succeed over the long term.

Like Prammer, Irani derives sustenance not just from the food she eats but from the relationships she creates. When she found a bad egg in a local dozen recently, she called the farmer — whom she knows well — and told him. He was devastated, she says, and offered a replacement. But for Irani, it was the peace of mind that really mattered.

For Jessica Prentice, the co-founder of the Bay Area’s Eat Local Challenge, that kind of interaction is exactly what drives the local food movement. In her recent book, Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection, Prentice argues for a return to a food system based on relationships. Knowing your local farmers means you can ask them direct questions: How do you treat your soil? What do you feed your cows? “It holds them to a level of accountability that’s far beyond what an organic certification does,” says Prentice.

Of course, accountability doesn’t come cheap. Eating locally also generally means spending more. Marc Rumminger says his food expenditures were higher than normal during the month-long Bay Area challenge but, he says, “this is a place where I want my money to go. So I think that was an important part of it: the idea of letting my personal market spaces do something useful.”