As fall begins and the air begins to take on a chill, many of the eco-groovy farmers’ market customers start to feel torn. Will they live on Annie’s Macaroni and Cheese for the winter months or return to the produce section of Safeway? In the post-“Inconvenient Truth” world, neither overly packaged or shipped from China food seems like a good option.
Eating local is in vogue and for good reasons. To save our local communities, stop global warming and fight the corporate power, living close to home in every way is absolutely necessary.
Maybe the problem is that the major intellectual force behind the local food movement is Michael Pollan, an investigative reporter from Berkley, of all places. Sure, that gives him great appeal among the liberals of Portland and Seattle, but it doesn’t lead to practical solutions to our everyday food challenges. Our attention now needs to turn to writers like Barbara Kingsolver or away from the bookstore altogether, towards the great teachers at the Farmers’ Market or living down Catharine St. in an old house with a root cellar.
For the local food movement to succeed, we need to keep away from Safeway even when there is frost on the ground. To do this takes only a little planning and a little work. In fact, eating local during the winter can be even easier than during the summer.
Part of the problem is that the local food movement, at least as it is manifested on Whitman campus, is driven by those that grew up in the suburbs and were raised by professionals. For example, canning is a skill that most of us are barely aware even exists, let alone one that we might possess or practice. Canning takes the kind of planning ahead and hot weather kitchen time that few people are willing to go through. It is the kind of work with delayed gratification that few will thank us for, but if we want to eat locally and have fruit in January it is precisely the kind of skill that we need to learn.
If canning is advanced level food storage, medium level food storage might be freezing food. It might necessitate cleaning out old boxed dinners and half drunk bottles of Monarch rum, but by blanching some string beans or just bagging some blueberries now, you can eat easily and deliciously through the months with hardly any work at all.
Easiest of all is obviously just buying food like winter squash, potatoes, onions, garlic, pumpkins and other roots. All you need is a dark place, relatively cool and dry in which to store them. These things won’t keep “forever” like frozen and canned goods will, but they will keep. The greatest challenge might be getting several months worth of squash home from the Farmers’ Market on the back of your bike. I recommend hiring one of the Pedicabs.
This all takes a lot of time and work during the part of the year when Whitman students like to be outside playing Frisbee, hiking or dancing naked in the moonlight. Sure, it means that all you’ll have to do exam week is defrost pesto or open a can of tomato sauce in order to eat close to home, but most of us would much rather have a salad or veggie burger in Reid.
This is basically the same reason that Bon Appetit only has the “Eat Local Challenge” twice a year, and that those two time fall well within peak growing season here in Eastern Washington. Neither Bon Appetit nor most Whitman students are really willing to give up lettuce for all except three months of the year. Maybe when oil prices really go through the roof, and out of season food returns to luxury price level, will we start to make a real commitment to eating local.
