Local Eating Challenge: Day 1

Finally, someone is forcing me to do a local eating challenge! Today, I started my two week foray by purchasing $90 in vegetables, $65 of which went toward 13 pounds of dried Sangre de Torro beans (a Mexican red bean brought to Tierra Farm by one of their Mexican employees). The woman, Evie, who sold me the beans was stunned asking, "Are you SURE you want all these beans?" Don't worry. They aren't just for me as I'll be sharing them with my classmates (I hope!).

For this assignment at least, I define local food as entirely produced within the surrounding 100 miles. Looking at this map, I feel a seafood craving coming on! But I wonder.... Last week, we toured a local organic dairy. At first, I had no thought of whether or not to consider them local or not - they are only 20 miles away. On the tour, I learned that they often purchase internationally grown grains for their cattle feed. Wow! That's a lot of "food miles" going into those cows. This is just one example of how much we ship things to & fro & how something that seems local may rely quite heavily on this system. We could consider the same question for vegetable seeds, soil amendments, etc. I decided not to use this criteria in my selection of foods, however, as it would likely promote starvation or, at best, malnutrition. :(

Today, I ate a delicious array of fresh veggies & fruits starting with homemade yogurt that my friends made (they even milked the cow) & a big, juicy peach from Nik's tree. Then, I bought about a billion kilos of beets, potatoes, sweet corn, beans, etc. at Tierra Vegetables' farm stand in Santa Rosa & promptly began chowing on it. I wish I had taken a photo of my dinner tonight (it was pretty!) but I was apparently too ravenous to think of that before inhaling it. What I can tell you is that it was indeed delicious: garlic mashed potatoes, & steamed cranberry beans & roasted gypsy pepper with Anaheim pepper, red onion, garlic & marjoram sauteed in Napa Valley olive oil. I also made some tasty & refreshing lemonade this afternoon, which I very much enjoyed on this very hot day!

Some resources to help you take your own local eating challenge!:

* 100 Mile Diet - www.100milediet.org
* Local Harvest - www.localharvest.org
* Locavores - www.locavores.com
* Eat Local Challenge - www.eatlocalchallenge.com
* Local Foods Wheel (SF Bay area) - www.localfoodswheel.com

it's on!

The feeding frenzy is getting in full swing here in lovely Sonoma County - plums, peaches, nectarines, peppers, cherry tomatoes, zucchini, figs, apples, mustard greens, arugula, cucumbers, basil, cilantro, snap peas, blackberries from friends, neighbors, our Eco Ag garden at school, my backyard.... Hooray!

I'm currently contemplating the concept of "food as medicine" & realizing that a significant meaning in it for me lies in sharing food with others. This is the cure for my loneliness: invite people to dinner!

I wish that I had more time to keep up with the blog but, well, I don't. Everyone has probably stopped checking it by now anyway. Some day I'll be back in full force. Some day....

Living Green Expo - May 5-6, 2007

Visit the 6th annual Living Green Expo this May! It's free, fun, educational & doesn't take much effort. Maybe you'll find some ways to save yourself some money or eat more yummy local food or install really cool enviro gadgets in your house...hmmm....

While you're there, check out Reed's workshop on biofuels & sustainability.

Jobs, Projects & Love: The Tale of an Update

First of all, I am alive & well - & getting busier & busier &.... For the curious, here is what I've been busy doing.

I have three jobs. Yes, three. Three jobs may sound like a lot of jobs to have at once but I must tell you that I've had more. Job #1 is Network Administrator for the School Garden Network of Sonoma County. Job #2 is doing administrative support for the consultant to the City of Petaluma's Green Team which includes work on their Going Green Expo (sound like something I've done before?). Job #3 is guest lecturing for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), which is a standardized test that many colleges require of foreign applicants for whom English is not their native language. The lecture recordings are used to give test takers the opportunity to show their verbal comprehension of college-level English.

On top of that, I'm also working on an internship with Petaluma Bounty, which is also my project for my Master's thesis. PB is a nonprofit that is working to create a sustainable local food system in Petaluma & is specifically working currently with people who are food insecure & hungry. My project is to coordinate the creation of a dashboard that will give users a snapshot of how PB's projects & the local food system are doing. What is a dashboard, you say? Think of how your car dashboard gives you a quick, easy-to-read display of the status of your car. Same idea. So right now I'm working on identifying stakeholders, data holders, & possible indicators to be used. I'm so excited!

I'm still dating Reed & while he does still live in Minneapolis, our relationship continues to be magical. He's been out to visit twice already & stayed for over two weeks in March. I feel very fortunate to have found such a like-minded, genuine & big-hearted person to love even if we are separated by 2000 miles of corn fields, Motel 6s, mountains, etc.

Tom sez: "Diet Coke + vitamins = healthy beverage!"

For those of you who have yet to read Tom Philpott's food blogs, he often comes with a side order of sarcasm. And, yes, that is one reason why I like him so much. This week he says, "Diet Coke + vitamins = healthy beverage!" & when he says "healthy," he means "ridiculously nutritionless." That's right, if goddamned Diet Coke can't sell you on "low calories" or the "fact" that "beautiful people" actually "drink" their product, they are now going to try to sell you some context-free nutrients floating around in there too, nutrients that will do NOTHING for you. I repeat, the nutrients will not be absorbed by your body & will literally end up in your toilet bowl where they will, unfortunately, continue to be useless to you. (I suggest you then send said nutrients back to Diet Coke for reprocessing. Reduce, reuse, recycle, renutrient!)

This is for all you chronic soda drinkers out there. It's OK. Just put the can down. Put the can down....

for those of us drinking bottled water

TIP OF THE WEEK:
ENDING BOTTLED WATER ADDICTION WILL SAVE MONEY & ENVIRONMENT

BOTTLED WATER ISN'T NECESSARILY CLEANER: According to the San Francisco Chronicle and lawsuits from the Environmental Law Foundation, 40% of bottled water is really just repackaged tap water. Maybe that's a good thing, considering federal standards for tap water are actually higher than those for bottled water.

BOTTLED WATER AND OIL: Supplying Americans with plastic water bottles for one year consumes more than 47 million gallons of oil, according to the Container Recycling Institute. That's enough to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Add in the additional amount of oil it takes to ship the bottles thousands of miles from extraction source to recipient, and your drink of H2O could be categorized with the "Hummers" of the world.

BOTTLED WATER AND BIODEGRADABILITY: Buddha's bones turned to dust a long time ago. But if he had been a bottled water drinker, that plastic would still be laying around. It takes two minutes to drink a bottle of water, but it takes thousands of years for that piece of plastic garbage to go away.

SOLUTION: Buy a water filter and a non-plastic water container of your preferred size. Fill it up in the morning before you go to work or school. Do a quick online search, and you can also find affordable portable water filters for when you are traveling. You'll save yourself and the environment a lot of expense.

Reprinted from Organic Bytes, newsletter of the Organic Consumers Association - February 22, 2007

My name is Krista & I am afraid of quicksand, OR How facts can save you a lot of worrying!

When I was a child, I experienced a dark & terrible period of walking fearfully through the outdoors never knowing when I might chance upon the most insidious of nature's devices of death, quicksand. A horrifying scene from the equally horrifying action/comedy TV series Lobo started my teeth a-chatterin' & my skin a-jumpin'. In the scene, one of Sheriff Lobo's bumbling deputies & then another one both get "sucked into" a patch of quicksand. Somehow those dipshits got out but, in my estimation, just barely.

Being the independent child that I was, I hid my paranoia for days until I finally admitted it to my mother who gently pulled out the encyclopedia to quell my fears with facts. So for those of you that might still be afraid of randomly falling into quicksand (I don't know anyone who has actually fallen in it but you never know...?), here's how to escape.