When Eating Local Is The Cheapest Option
Felisa Rogers writes for Salon.com,
It was always something: glossy garnet plums, candy red romas trucked from Mexico in the dead of winter. I wanted to eat a local, seasonal diet, I really did. I liked the idea of buying all my produce at the farmers’ market, or joining a CSA, or growing most of our food. But somehow I never got around to joining the CSA, and the weekend crowds at our local farmers’ market kept me at bay. We did garden, but Seattle’s seasons were not conducive to a high yield: Some years our tomatoes never ripened beyond dark green. In the end, I bought most of our produce at the local grocery store, where I tried to do my best.
Our local supermarket was an overpriced yuppie mart with a good selection of local, organic, seasonal produce. I had the opportunity to use my buying dollars to support small local farms, but it was rough to shell out $4 for a bunch of kale. I’d read Michael Pollan’s argument: “We [Americans] spend a smaller percentage of our income on food than any other industrialized society; surely if we decided that the quality of our food mattered, we could afford to spend a few more dollars on it in a week.” As much as I admire Pollan, there is something cavalier in his dismissal of the problem of price. Does Pollan really remember what it was like to struggle financially? I came back to this thought to make myself feel better every time I chose Mexican zucchinis for 99 cents a pound over their more expensive locally grown, seasonally correct alternative. I told myself that if I were rich it would be easy to be good. I’d only eat organic, local, seasonal produce. Really. It never occurred to me that in fact the opposite was true, that poverty would enable me to finally evade the temptation of the cheap Chilean asparagus.
My husband and I were both laid off in October of 2008, and while we’ve worked on and off since then, we’ve keenly felt the economic crunch. For the past three years, our lives have been an exercise in reduction. First we stopped eating out, then we stopped buying specialty items, then we found ourselves unable to afford items that had once seemed basic: peanut butter, bacon, grapes in February. We moved to the country in order to cut our expenses, but our move coincided with the end of my husband’s unemployment benefits, and our budget dwindled more quickly than our expenses. Produce was expensive and driving to town to buy groceries required precious gas, so I began looking closer to home for food. Why buy boring Mexican zucchini when edible wild plants grew in thickets around the house? The grocery store on a limited budget was stressful; foraging was fun.
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