apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I thought it was funny that she put in such a big plug for Farmer's Diner in VT... I went there a few months ago and was severely underwhelmed (long lines, average food). However I do like the idea of restaurants that focus on local foods - we have the "Vermont Fresh Network" of restaurants (http://www.vermontfresh.net) which all serve food from nearby farms. That makes it easy to find and support locavore-friendly establishments. I wish more places were so enlightened!

I think that planning not time is the biggest issue when it comes to eating at home and or buying locally. We live in an area where delivery is limited to plastic pizza, and since the arrival of our son last July, we have been forced to eat dinner at home nearly every night. The more we cook at home the easier we find it to be, especially, if we plan our weekly meals on Sunday. Unless one is doing drive through food, I don't think that the 20 or 30 minutes that it takes to make a quick meal at home plus 20 minutes to eat is any longer than it takes to drive (or travel in general), order & wait for food, eat it and get home.

I don't think it is plausible for most of us to actually live like the Kingsolvers, but we could certainly buy local when we can and plan ahead a lot more than we do. I tried canning for the first time last fall (after reading Plenty) and I made a peach pie on New Years with several jars of peaches that I had canned. It was twice as good knowing that we were eating a little bit of Colorado summer at the end of the year!

I also think that the more we talk openly and request local things in stores, the more the market will grow to accommodate locavores.

Needless to say, I think the time argument is totally disingenuous. I love eating out, but you know what? It takes a long time. Going to a restaurant, especially if a large group is involved, can easily stretch to 2 or more hours. In contrast, I can whip up an easy, delicious meal at home in 30 minutes.

I think the problem is that a lot of people (busy moms especially) consider time in the kitchen cooking as time wasted. It's time away from the family spent doing something they consider a boring, thankless chore. It doesn't have to be that way, though. Moms can be forceful in bringing kids and husbands into the process of shopping and cooking for food. Eating is a team sport; why shouldn't shopping and cooking be, also?

Anyway, I know I'm just repeating what Kingsolver tacitly recommended, but it's fun to put it in my own words :D

The first notable thing I remember from chapters 9-13 is Barbara's adventure to learn how to make cheese. I had no idea that it was so easy and I'm surprised that more people don't do it. Ok, I'm not all that surprised since our personal connections to food have been unceremoniously severed by fast food and nutrition science, but still ...

From chapter 11, the follow sentence really hit me: "It crossed my mind that the world's most efficient psychological evaluation would have just the one question: Define splurge." I couldn't agree more!

In chapter 13, all the info she gave about how she preps things ahead of time and puts them in the freezer for later use is ingenious. Canning is another food activity that I have been adamant about trying and reading about her adventures make me all the more excited about trying it in the next year or so.

I was also pretty surprised by how easy she found it to make cheese - I'm going to have to give it a go myself, I think.

And I agree with everyone else here: eating out or getting takeaway isn't that much faster than making it yourself *if* you've prepared by shopping for food earlier.

I, also was intrigued by the cheese-making plugs in these chapters... and have bookmarked the DIY ricotta featured in the kitchen (which I understand may be more like farmer's cheese, not ricotta).

Here in Cleveland, the farmers' market movement is just taking hold, despite the large Amish communities living and farming within 50 miles of the city and its suburbs. It being winter, 'seasonal' eating is really limited to squash or canned goods at the farmers' market, but one local (somewhat upscale, unfortunately for my pocketbook) grocery chain does post a large sign profiling the farm/farmer when they have a local item featured, and then a little sign stating 'locally grown' is placed when it's not really on special. I noticed it a lot during the summer/fall months, but there's not so many now. I'm instead looking for the stickers on all the produce and picking the ones that are geographically closest, even if it's as far as Florida vs. California or Mexico.

Perhaps more suited for the last chapter/post, but: I also recently saw milk bottles from a farm in a rural community south of here, in glass bottles, with print on it that says it can be refilled or the bottle can be exchanged at the farm. Haven't got the (balls? guts?) inclination to explore that area yet, but we'll see what happens. It might take one more read of AVM to sell me enough to go wandering around the country-parts just to refill my gallon of milk.

On a side note, I have decided to sign up for a CSA this coming growing season. Hopefully this will almost eliminate trips to the grocery for faraway-grown, sprayed, waxed fruits and veggies. My plans for meat/eggs: finally explore those mysterious stands with coleman coolers at the farmers' market.

I finished reading the book last month, before boarding a jet from LAX to New Zealand. (Horribly not green.)

Our host in NZ told us that they don't practice feed lot factory farming in NZ. They raise all their animals on pasture. (He has a degree in applied science which is like our agriculture/land management programs.)

Because I am allergic to several common antibiotics, eating "conventionally-raised" US farm animals often causes me to break out in rashes. In the interest of science, I ate lots of lamb, beef and chicken. No rash.
http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/2007/12/what-we-eat.html

Because it was their summer, I ate lots of summer produce. Everything tasted wonderful. Instead of shipping NZ produce to us in the northern hemisphere in the middle of our winter, perhaps we can ship ourselves to NZ instead? I wonder how that works out in the carbon budget? ;-P