Joel Salation of Polyface Farm has a useful, practical definition of “local”– you can drive there and back in a day. This gives you about a 4-hour radius, or just under 300 miles. If you adjust for local conditions, this is a way to define your own local “food shed,” which About.com describes as
…everything between where a food is produced and where a food is consumed. It includes the land it grows on, the routes it travels, the markets it goes through, and the tables it ends up gracing.
Most areas of the country can find local vegetables, and even local meat. Really committed locavores produce their own to the extent they can. And for these food types it’s easy. You seldom find blogs wondering where to source local meat and veggies.
Prepared foods are another story. Some foods are easy to make yourself, even if you’re a busy, urban worker bee like me. Things like pickles, tomato sauce are reasonably easy to make in your own kitchen.
But other foods are harder–mustard, ketchup, salt.
And then there’s flour.
It is murderously hard to find locally grown and milled flour and flour products. Sure there are bakeries, but where do they get their flour? I buy my bread from a local bakery, but they get their flour “from all over” and had no idea if it was organic. It hadn’t occurred to them to ask (yes, I’m looking for a different baker). And pasta? Forget it. Everyone tells me to just make my own, but I need to draw the line somewhere, and say that, finally I don’t have time. And the local mills never ever ever have white flour, which I’m sorry, sometimes you need. I’ve tried pastry crust and tollhouse cookies with whole wheat. It’s not the same.
So what can you do? It’s frustrating to have your ethics defined by external limitations over which you have no control.
For the Dark Days Challenge, I would say, since the challenge is “one day a week” and not “every meal”–don’t sweat it. Do what you can, but on your Dark Days meal, no pasta if the flour and the manufacture isn’t local. Dark Days is an intellectual, not a practical, challenge. One day a week, no salt, no cinnamon, no rice (for us northerners), and so on.
For the rest of the time, think about history. Yes, history. Evidence of trading for exotic, and even for staple, food goods dates far back into prehistory, with truly ancient evidence of trade for things like salt and seafood, and more recent (just a couple thousand years) trade for spices (think Silk Road).
Eating local is mostly about supporting a local economy and creating connection and community across socio-economic strata (office worker to farmer, for instance). It’s NOT about denying the existence of the rest of world. In the modern world, I can eat a banana, or an orange, or a lemon in Chicago, and I’m going to. I can have cinnamon, and I have to have salt. They don’t mine it in Illinois anymore, and trust me no one knows where salt comes from, I’ve tried to find out.
The only thing that you can do is keep asking. Demand local. If enough of us start selecting the local products over the imports, and stop buying imported things that can be made locally, but aren’t, the world will change.
Great post!!
I do try to eat local, but I’m also aware of why certain crops are grown where they are.
For example, one of the world’s largest producers of legumes (dry peas, chickpeas and lentils) is the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Why? Semi-arid conditions mean fewer pathogen issues, which means fewer fungicide treatments, even for conventionally grown crops.
So, I can try to get local, heavily-treated chickpeas, or I can source them from a more sustainable growing area.
For now, what I cannot grow, I try to source sustainably grown, whether or not that is “local” to me.
This a practical approach to the problem. We need to think in terms of the health of ourselves, our society, and our planet, and not get locked into dogma.
I think I’ll have to do without pasta and bread for the first few Challenge meals. When I first read about this Challenge I figured I could just go to my local farmers’ market to supplement what I have in my freezer. Then I found out that it allows re-sellers–HUGE disappointment. I’ve since found another market that is truly a FARMERS’ market. I’ve also found a local cheese person. I’ve been asking vendors where they’re from and how they grow their products, and when I tell them about the challenge I’m doing, they always think it’s pretty cool. 🙂
I figure now that I have the meat, vegetables, cheese and other dairy products sorted out, I can start the hunt for local flour next.
This is a great post, Xan. Thanks for this. I’m afraid my budget doesn’t allow me to splurge on some of the higher end local things this year, and my lack of a garden for the first time in 5 years has taken away my major source for fresh produce…. but i can commit to one meal a week. Even if it’s a simple ‘eggs and homemade yogurt’ breakfast.
But man, this challenge will sure be easier when the farmer’s market’s back open! the local co-op is just TOO expensive for this half-unemployed family.
I agree, source what you can locally and find ethical small farm/producer sources for the rest. I don’t stick to a 100% local ethic, even in some cases where I can find something made locally but it’s inferior to what I can find elsewhere. For example, there’s a salt mine in my hometown, though I don’t buy their salt because I find it inferior to the unrefined salt that I use. I don’t want to purchase a refined product with added chemicals even if it is local. I’ll take my Himalayan pink salt or Celtic Sea salt over the locally produced refined stuff with added chemicals.
It’s all about finding what works for you while taking advantage of the time we live in. In the winter you will always find a box of citrus from a small farm somewhere in a citrus growing state!
As for flour goes, for those of us in the Eastern half of the US, I cannot recommend King Arthur flour more highly as a wonderful small company with the highest quality ingredients. I still purchase local grains and mill them myself for the majority of my baked goods, but when I need a specific flour with a certain % of protein and gluten for an artisan bread I always go with KA.
Salt is an issue for me because of my low thyroid. I actually went back to using iodized table salt, because I’ve been unable to find iodized salt in other forms, and naturally iodine is hard to come by in other foods. It’s one of those choices you need to make, but again, the point is being mindful of what you’re doing, and why.
We purchase local as much as possible, so that means we do without a lot of things that can’t be grown here (and let me tell you how hard it is to walk past the cherries and raspberries in the grocery store!!!). However, it means that when we travel, we bring home a bag full of goods that were local to wherever we visited. Maple syrup, raspberry jam, rhubarb, wild-caught salmon… mmmm. We always hoard those specialty items and dole them out a little at a time to make them last, ’cause when they’re gone, there isn’t any more. Sure, I could buy those same items at the grocery, but when we’re eating something we picked up specially, we remember our trip and really savor what we’re eating.
Being from Boston, i use King Arthur as my practical source for most flour products. They are a company I am happy to support and fall within my local foodshed, though I know their flour comes from a variety of sources. On occasion I can find flour from a few specialty farms in this area, but it is not convenient enough to have a regular consistent supply.
For basic spices (salt, pepper, etc) I am willing to make an exception, when I focus on my dark days meals I use local herbs, primarily from my garden.
I wish the locally owned grocers here would stock King Arthur–you can get it at the chain store, but it isn’t locally owned anymore.
I’m lucky enough to have a source for local(ish) organic flour. Their wheat is from PA and surrounding states so it might not quite meet the “drive there in a day” definition for me (near Philadelphia) but it’s pretty close. You can buy it in PA, NY and a few places in NJ.
http://www.daisyflour.com/
Great post! I was so excited to find a local source for wheat flour, corn meal, and legumes this past Saturday at the winter farmers market about 45 minutes from my house! I 100% agree that sometimes you need white flour though… That’s what I’m working on for now, I haven’t gotten to the salt yet! I’m trying to work my way through the freezer/pantry and replace items with SOLE as I run out of things.
I eat local as much as possible including growing my own food. I am a big fan of Joel Salatin.
Thanks for posting about flour! I’m on the Eastern seaboard and didn’t realize that King Arthur flour was a better flour source – that’s a change I can easily make in my life. Local organic flour will continue to be a challenge for me – but I figure that we have enough local potatoes available that they can serve as our starch for our Dark Days meals. And it looks like the Daisy Flour is available in a local market in Vienna…not too far from me…although it won’t count as within my 150 mile radius.
I think that is a great point, the difference between the decisions we make when we want to “eat local” as a life style choice and meeting the goal of the Dark Days challenge. I am lucky enough to be able to get local wheat here at the farmer’s market…it makes very “healthy” tasting biscuits. 🙂 In general I do use flour from our local flour mill (Fairhaven Flour) and expand my definition of local to regional (Pacific Northwest).
I’ve always felt like any kind of foodie fundamentalism is ultimately self-sabotaging, particularly when so many of us have very real income and time limitations we have to work within. I don’t use a great deal of salt, so the time and money that would be spent trying to find local salt (in the name of absolute to-the-letter adherence to the ideal) has a much greater impact if I put it toward sourcing local meat or buying bushels of tomatoes from a local farmer in the summer and preserving them. Making your own bread is still better than buying store loaves, even if you can’t find that perfect source of flour — it still cuts out a lot of packaging waste and fuel used on transportation.
That said, give condiments a try — ketchup is quite easy! It’s actually a bit less work than making regular tomato sauce, although it takes longer. We do ours in a crock pot so we don’t have to sit there watching it for hours, and it turns out fantastic — much better than what you’d buy at the grocery store. I haven’t made mustard yet but have heard from friends that it’s not difficult, and both can be made in large batches, canned, and stored for a long time.
Here in NW IN, while many of the farmers’ markets have closed for the year, I have a local “fruit stand” which gets a majority of its fruits and vegetables from MI (strong Dutch ties) so I count that as local since it’s less than an hour’s drive to MI. Yes, the produce is cooler-kept now that the growing season is mostly over but they’ll stay open until the end of the year. The trick here is to find affordable meat and poultry that’s been humanely, locally raised.
Hey Xan, great post!
I have to agree with your thoughts about the difference between the Challenge and everyday life. The Challenge is really intended to make people think, and then share the challenges they experience and the great local finds they make.
We make an effort to source the majority of our foods locally, but when we can’t we make the best choices we can. For instance, neither of us is willing to give up citrus for the winter so we make a point of buying organic from California if shopping at the co-op and sometimes order a whole case from a favorite grower.
Here’s a shout out for local flour in Michigan…Westwind Milling.
http://www.westwindonline.shoppingcartsplus.com/home.html
Great post! Local produce is always easy for us with our garden, even in the winter. Eggs are also easy because we have our own chickens. We are also very lucky to live only 15 miles from a flour mill, it’s not organic flour but it is local. Our biggest challenges for the dark days challenge will be meat, pasta and dairy. We are searching for sources now, keep your fingers crossed for us!!
Great conversation here! I think the point about the challenge being an intellectual exercise is an excellent one. I learn the most about farming, food routes, and commercial food processing practices when I aim for the 100% meal. I learn how to make things from scratch and how to improvise. (It turns out I like corn muffins better when I make them with melted butter rather than oil.) It’s all about learning. But I agree with a commenter above: I don’t think being overly dogmatic helps anyone in the long run.