Yesterday, I wrote about how much fun I have cooking and eating local organic food—and how it’s not uncommon for 80 percent of our dinners to be grown within a few miles of our house.

Today, I want to talk about what local organic food means personally, and to the planet.

For me:

  • Food that’s fun to cook and delicious to eat
  • Super-fresh, and loaded with nutrition, vitamins, and minerals (instead of toxic chemicals)
  • Very frugal
  • Children who feel a direct connection to where their food comes from and how it grows—and who have carried their food awareness into their own lives in big cities, now that they’re grown
  • Community; we always see friends when we pick up our share at the CSA farm, and they have educational programs like herb walks or food preservation workshops, potlucks and concerts once in a while

As an example of the dollars and cents, consider the six-flat of tomato plants we bought. I think we paid $3—so 50 cents per plant. Let’s amortize the fixed costs of the garden across all the crops, and add another $3 to cover the tomatoes’ share. So we’re up to $6.

Fresh local organic tomatoes are usually around $3 per pound at the local farmers  markets—so we break even on the second pound. This is a slow year; we’re only getting about a dozen tomatoes a week, perhaps four pounds. Some years we get more like 40 pounds a week. But even with this year’s limited crop, that means we’re pulling in $120 worth over a ten-week harvest season, and in a good year, that number is more like $1200. And that’s just one crop; we’re also growing broccoli, green beans, kidney beans, eggplant, kale, onions, basil, rosemary, cucumbers, zucchini, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, and peas (earlier in the year). The whole garden costs us less than $100 for the year.

We split the $600 CSA membership with another family, and we collect our share for about 23 weeks, typically getting 10-20 pounds of organic produce per week—or roughly 345 pounds for the year. If the stores averaged even $4 per pound (they’re often higher for organic), that means our $300 has turned into $1380—not bad!

Saving so much money on our local organic produce lets us justify the expense of the locally produced food craft items at the farmers markets; the cheeses and eggs are quite a bit more expensive than the industrial versions in supermarkets. But it’s worth it, because they taste so much better, feel so much better in our bodies, and help our local organic farmers stay in farming. And with those foods, a little goes a long way; $10 or $20 a week gives us all we need.

The Planet:

Now, let’s look at what my food lifestyle means to the economy and ecology of my town, and the whole country:

  • Very low carbon footprint. Instead of being shipped across the country, our food is hand-carried about 100 feet from our garden to our kitchen, or brought three miles (five kilometers) from the CSA farm either by car or bicycle. Instead of requiring huge inputs of petrochemicals and petrolabor, we work our garden by hand, except for the initial rototilling. And as vegetarians, our carbon footprint is much lower than if we ate meat (it would be lower still if we went vegan).
  • Chemical-free. No health effects from pesticides and herbicides—to me and those who share my table, or to the farmers who grow it. AND no harmful effects to the soil and the water.
  • Good for the local economy. Our farm membership fee and the dollars we spend on local dairy products, bread, and fruit stay in the community, instead of being siphoned off by a dozen middlemen and into the coffers of far-away corporations.
  • Good for farmland. Every farmer that sells food to us is a farmer who is keeping the land in agriculture instead of selling that land off for development—and every successful local organic farm is a living lesson to other farmers that they don’t need to douse the earth (and their customers’ bodies) with poisons.

Pretty cool!

Now it’s Your Turn:

Please leave a comment about how you’ve incorporated (or will start incorporating) local artisan foods into your lifestyle. How are local organic foods making a difference to you?

Still need ideas? Tomorrow’s blog will provide concrete steps you can take to green your food, even if you live in a city. I do have to warn you though: once you’ve tasted REAL food, you won’t ever be satisfied by the poor imitations that dominate the industrial food system.

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This time of year, we spend an astonishing amount of time dealing with food: harvesting from our garden, making salads, cooking, preserving, giving or occasionally selling surplus…but it is SO worth it!

Long before we had a garden of our own, I’ve been an advocate of local community food self-sufficiency. Not that a neighborhood or village would grow all its own food, but even the most urban could grow some vegetables and herbs, some berries.

Food is a basic necessity, and as such should be a right (ditto for drinkable water and health care, among other things). But in many poor communities, there are few gardens and not even any supermarkets. Rooftops, vacant lots, and even windowsills could change this—and in the process, empower residents, break down barriers, form friendships, save people money…and introduce folks to the absolute joy of eating fresh organic produce grown right where you are.

Yesterday, I made a batch of pure tomato sauce: no oil, no water, no herbs, no onions or garlic, just fresh ripe garden tomatoes, cooked in their own juice for several hours, until the sauce was about a third of the original volume, and had a flavor so royally rich you’d think it was made of 24-karat gold. Today, it was Dina’s night to cook. Earlier today, she went and got a couple of pounds of green beans out of the garden (along with another 40 full-size and 125 cherry tomatoes, enough corn for our lunch, celery, eggplant, edemame, zucchini, and I forget what else). She cooked the beans lightly for a few minutes in my super-intense tomato sauce and served them over couscous. WOW! Served with a salad of our own cucumbers and tomatoes and lettuce from our local CSA farm, plus some Turkish olives and feta cheese, it was a fabulous dinner.

Today, I made another batch of that good sauce (most of which we’re freezing for the winter), a batch of zucchini pickles, and a batch of dried tomatoes. Dina processed the leeks for freezing. I confess, we’re putting in a couple of hours a day. It really helps that I work at home and that Dina doesn’t have to go teach at the university in the summer. Seems like every break I take from the computer I am dealing with food. But come January, when the produce you can buy is almost inedible, we will pull some of our bounty from the freezer or from the dried stash in the pantry, and we will enjoy locally grown meals almost as good as those we’re feasting on now.

It’s an experience that should be shared widely. I feel very sorry for those people who’ve never had a REAL fresh tomato. Comparing it to a supermarket tomato is like comparing a perfectly aged French triple-cream gourmet cheese with Velveeta.

And I feel grateful not only to live in a place where we can have a garden, but in a time when consciousness of local organic and fresh foods is high, and where food is helping people know their neighbors and boost their nutrition.

Yes, a tomato can change the world.

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