Eating local

24 September, 2017, 9 min, 1659 words

Tags: nyc environment

One of my teammates, Becca Tucker, mentioned in passing around the beginning of September that she and her family were “eating local” for the duration of the month. She lives on a farm upstate and tends to be very conscious of her impact on the environment, so it felt like a natural thing for her to do, but I didn’t expect that she would in turn challenge me to give it a try. After all, I live in the middle of the largest city in the country; there’s no way I could eat “local,” whatever that meant.

But she did suggest it, and after a fair bit of pondering and plotting I decided to give it a shot. Rather than a full month I did a week, but other than that I adhered to the same rules as her and followed where that led.

Tucker was also kind enough to supply me with some local staples: sunflower seed oil, local oats, and around two cups of local flour.

The spirit rather than the letter

The rules, in a general sense, were:

Eat only food that was grown or raised within 250 miles of where you live.

I chose, like Tucker, to interpret this as applying to all ingredients in a dish as well: if I wanted to eat bread it had better be made locally with local flour, and so on.

Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that. The spirit of the challenge was minimizing the cost (both financial and carbon) of transporting food during its lifetime. As a result, there’s a blanket exception for spices. There’s a reason that they were one of the first goods traded over very long distances: they pack some real bang for your transportation buck. I chose to extend the same logic to tea, partially because it feels similar and partially because it gave me the ability to meet up with friends for “coffee” and actually order something at most coffee shops.

Along the same lines, if a friend had been coming to town from far away anyway and decided to bring some tomatoes from their backyard, I would have felt comfortable eating them as “local” despite the total distance they’d traveled, because that total distance wasn’t just for the food. More practically, when I met up with Tucker, who lives a few hundred miles north of me, we didn’t worry about the non-overlap of our 250-mile radii and counted something as local if it was local for either of us.

Finally, there was room in the original rules for up to five exceptions of almost any magnitude: Tucker picked cashews, for instance, and then incorporated them in meals, mixed them into granola, and used them as snacks on their own. I chose to scale that back a little, as I was only going local for a week, but still excepted daily multivitamins and protein powder in smoothies.

What I ate

With Tucker’s eating local starter pack and my weekly bag of vegetables, I was off to a good start. I also did a fair bit of farmers’ market shopping throughout the week as I ran low on various foods.

Breakfasts

Breakfasts were the easiest meal of the day to eat local: I made myself some oatmeal or fried up a couple of eggs and topped them with cheese. One day I was feeling adventurous and whipped up a batch of pancakes to be eaten with apple and maple syrup.

Lunches and dinners

I bought a whole chicken my first day of eating local, baked it up with some vegetables, and enjoyed the bounty the rest of the week. Other than that, steamed vegetables played a prominent role, as did sauteed bok choy and raw bell pepper. I also “ate out” with some friends one day at Union Square Farmers’ Market, which entailed delicious bread (that I didn’t have to bake!) with cheese and apple butter and tomato.

Snacks

I am a big snacker, so it was important to keep snacks in mind going into this challenge. The main snacks I ate were:

Popcorn! I found a local popcorn grower a few weeks back and bought myself a pound of unpopped kernels, then popped about a quarter cup every day as a snack. Dried apple. I learned to dehydrate apple and enjoyed delicious chips many days. Baked apple. Did you know you can bake an apple in the microwave? Me neither! But I did it a few times and it turned out delicious. My very favorite snack/meal of the week was a baked apple with a touch of maple syrup, butter, and cinnamon. Various fruits. Think strawberries, grapes, peaches, more apples…

Regionals

The biggest challenge of my week of eating local came at the end: my Ultimate team, BENT, traveled to Devens, MA for a tournament that would determine whether we went to Nationals. That meant that by Friday afternoon I needed to pack enough food to get me through two days with lots of strenuous physical activity. I ended up preparing:

• A cup of dry oats for oatmeal in the mornings.
• Two ready-to-blend smoothies. These used apple, peach, strawberry, spinach, milk, and whey protein (my exception from above). I brought my magic bullet single-serving blender along and blended a smoothie up both mornings in the hotel.
• Enchiladas (same as I made here) for dinners Friday through Sunday. This continued to be the tastiest food I’ve ever made from scratch.
• Leftover tortillas from the enchilada-making process. I made these from scratch with some local flour, and they turned out pretty tasty, if a bit stiff when they cooled off.
• Partially-dehydrated apple and peach. It turns out I’m not patient enough to fully dehydrate moist fruit in my oven, so my final result was apple chips ranging from slightly soggy to just plain baked and very soggy peach chunks.
• My very own sugary goop. Many of my teammates use some sort of goo or chew with glucose and sometimes caffeine to keep themselves going through long games. I’ve never gotten into them myself, but ended up packing something similar when I started to dehydrate grapes to make raisins and gave up around halfway through. The result was a deliciously sugary goop somewhere between raisins and grape juice. I nibbled this all weekend but saved the majority for our last two games, which were most important for us.
• Two loaves of bread. I ate these (and shared them) with butter, apple butter, and cheese cubes all weekend long.

In addition to that, during our first day at the tournament we had a bye (a round of games that we had off) and my teammate and I decided to venture out and find some local-to-Massachusetts food. We tried a farm store that turned out to be a yarn store (??) and then hit up a harvest festival, where we bought some fabulous local sweet potato chili.

Things I learned

Eating local was an eye-opening experience. A few things I’ve taken away from it:

• New York City is far from the worst place to try this out! Union Square Farmers’ Market has pretty much anything you could need, including things like local flour and butter. That makes eating local an easier prospect in the city than in many suburbs or areas of more rural America.
• Apples are incredible and diverse and delicious. On at least one day I consumed no fewer than five (smallish) apples in various forms (baked, dried, raw, as sauce on meat…). They’re a seasonal favorite and honestly just plain delicious.
• This is a fascinating way to get familiar with what grows in your area. Talking to a friend on the west coast, I realized just how New England-specific my diet for this week was. My west coast friend, doing a similar challenge, would have eaten a lot of almonds and kale and citrus and far fewer apples and squash.
• At least in the city, eating local requires a bit of extra work and definitely some extra spending, so it’s definitely not for everyone. I’m glad I’m in a position where I could afford to try it out for a bit. The final rundown for the week was that what I bought local was around 20-30% pricier than buying the same things at my local grocery store. That seems to be about the same magnitude of difference between shopping at Whole Foods versus Trader Joe’s. It also doesn’t account for the fact that some cheaper food options simply aren’t available locally, making the cost of eating local a little higher than the above percentage would suggest. That 20-30% is also very non-uniformly distributed between various products: produce and cheese were similarly priced, while chicken, flour, and butter were much more expensive to buy locally.
• This isn’t so much a fun fact as a change of perspective: I notice myself thinking much more about where my food comes from. I’m more aware than ever before of the difficulty of creating acidic sauces without lemons, of the dearth of nuts local to the northeast, and of the sheer number of fruits that simply can’t be grown around here.
• It is entirely possible to create delicious and healthy food within the constraints of local eating. I wasn’t so sure about this to begin with (“what do you mean I can’t use olive oil or peanut butter?”), but now I know for a fact that it’s possible and not even that hard. Who knows, maybe I’ll try doing this a little more regularly (once per season, for instance) and see what happens!