Hungry for change: One woman’s week as a localvore

By Jen Gilbert | Special to the Vermont Guardian
photo by David Shaw

Posted August 18, 2006

It sounded easy. Spend the first week of August as a “localvore” eating only foods grown within 100 miles of my southern Vermont home.

It sounded like a noble cause, a way to support local farmers, reduce the average 1,500 miles a U.S. meal travels from the producer to the kitchen table, and find out what it would be like to live more sustainably.

It sounded fun. My mind danced with images of biking down to the local farm, picking up some fresh eggs, and scrambling them with kale picked from my garden.

In practice, well, two out of three ain’t bad. It was a noble cause and, at times at least, fun. But easy it wasn’t.

Phylogeny of a localvore

The localvore concept began in the San Francisco Bay Area, which, one may note, is within 100 miles of avocados, pomegranates, and olives. This summer and into the fall, localvore “pods” are sprouting throughout Vermont and New Hampshire, challenging food buyers to do as little as include one local item in a meal for a week, to as much as dedicate themselves to local-only food for an entire month.

In early July, I signed up to be a localvore with the Brattleboro chapter after one of the organizers assured me that most people were carving out “wild cards” — exceptions for particular, non-local foods they knew they could not be without.

Having taken care of my initial reluctance to give up my morning coffee no matter how noble the cause, I thought the rest would be relatively simple. After all, during the first week in August, blueberries are bursting on the bush, corn is ready to harvest, and zucchini is taking gardens hostage.

Since I am one of those deluded people who think that you can control a situation by thinking ahead, my localvore experience began with a planning stage a week in advance. I ticked off the list of foods that routinely fill my week, and slowly realized the localvore challenge was just that.

Breakfast: yogurt with fruit and cereal, seltzer with orange juice. Easy, Vermont’s Butterworks Farms produces yogurt from its own cows. Fruit, those bursting blueberries or raspberries. But what about cereal? Orange juice? Seltzer? In particular, Gerolsteiner, that fussy German naturally carbonated stuff that I drink like, well, water?

Boxed in at breakfast, I turned to lunch. There would be plenty of salad greens, beets, carrots, and so on. Yet, what was I going to put on them, the nearest source for olive oil being California? A localvore website described a sunflower oil from Butterworks Farm in Westfield as the best bet, but noted it was not available this year.

The orange juice I could live without, and the cereal, too. The Gerolsteiner I reluctantly foreswore for the week. But the idea of yummy, height-of-summer greens nude in my salad bowl seemed more an insult to their creator than anything else. I made oil and vinegar an exception. It’s only one exception if you cleverly call it “salad dressing.”

The wonders of shiso tea

By Day 1, my kitchen was supplied with local chicken, bison patties, fruits, veggies, and locally roasted coffee. I had adopted the (necessary) attitude that rather than struggle to find substitutes for my usual eating patterns, I would reconstruct them for the week, making the best of the local bounty offered to me.

After the localvore kick-off pancake breakfast (local buckwheat, blueberries, and sourdough starter), I hit the Brattleboro Farmers’ Market with the intention of rounding out my stockpile with in-season greens and some mint for tea, since without it I’d be confined to water and coffee as drinks.

I had no luck, but spotted some tall, leafy stalks of shiso, that uniquely aromatic Japanese green with leaves textured like a furrowed field. Thinking it might make a mean tea, I headed home, a two-foot stalk sticking out of my ecologically sound string bag.

Shiso tea turned out to be the most successful food experiment of the week. When boiled, the greens produce a fragrant tea with a slowly developing flavor, first grassy, then lemony.

Without the constraint of eating locally, I never would have tried it. And while I am aware of the irony of counting as a success tea made from a green brought some 6,600 miles to Vermont, it did illustrate that the challenge of the week was not so much about finding local foods. You could survive a week on local corn and lamb at every meal. More, the challenge was in finding crafty ways to prepare and combine what was at hand when many of the usual suspects — salt, pepper, ginger, soy sauce, sugar, peanut butter, etc. — weren’t invited to the table.

True, my maple syrup pops made in the ice cube tray with local cream bombed. If I hadn’t spent high school chemistry doodling rock band names in my textbook, I’d understand why the syrup stubbornly separates and refuses to freeze. Yet, more often than not, I found myself enjoying the creativity counter-intuitively fostered by reducing, rather than constantly expanding as our modern world allows, food options.

Grain is good

The morning of Day 2, I had what would become my usual breakfast — yogurt and blueberries. With a friend visiting from Brooklyn, I took off on a farm tour in Westminster West after carefully filling a bottle with very local well water. By noon, I was hungry and even light-headed. I had dismissed the cereal in my yogurt as something I could live without. I had not realized until Day 2 that I would also be giving up most other sources of grain — rice, crackers, pasta, etc. As a result, I felt a near constant hunger.

Some localvores stock up on Vermont-grown whole wheat and spelt available in bulk from local suppliers. However, my grain-deprived diet was not just a product of my lack of preparation. One of the most delightful surprises of the farm tour was a farmer proudly showing off his two rice paddies, which would, he hoped, bear grain by September and be a start toward more local self-sufficiency in grain.

The ability to grow rice in Vermont is not one of those rare benefits of global warming. I learned that in Japan, rice is grown as far north as the 43rd parallel, nearly the same as Westminster West. Vermont could grow more grain. For a variety of reasons — less than desirable climate, cheaper grain available elsewhere, yield per square foot — we don’t. If one believes climate change and transportation costs may shift some of those considerations, it might be time to grow more.

By Days 3 and 4, the initial difficulty and obsessing about what I couldn’t eat wore off. I ate more corn; my salads were stuffed with beets and potatoes; I mixed turnips and kale into a filling morning omelet. On Day 5, I bought a loaf of bread made from local spelt and airborne yeast. Rarely have I been so happy as I when I slapped two extra thick slices around blue cheese, basil, and tomatoes.

Throughout the week, I ate considerably more dairy, potatoes, and salad greens. I ate almost nothing that I didn’t cook myself or have someone cook for me. Processed foods — even the most benign or locally produced — do not restrict themselves to local inputs.

I spent much more time and effort with each meal, often traveling longer distances to get ingredients and starting each dish from scratch. I also spent more money, although the fact that restaurants and Spanish red wine were out of the question kept the tally from being grossly out of proportion with a typical week.

Good beyond good to eat

More than a shift in eating, being a localvore required a shift in perspective. Normally, my goals are foods that are good to eat and good for me. Being a localvore wasn’t about eating well exclusively. I did eat well. I would have eaten even better with some salt and pepper.

However, being a localvore was also about other “goods”: being thoughtful about where foods were coming from, who was producing them, how they were getting from the field to the plate, and how to reduce the less-desirable impact of our eating habits.

And when I wasn’t fantasizing about brownies, I did a lot of thinking and acting in pursuit of those things.

I joined a community supported agriculture (CSA) group during the localvore week, something I’ve done in the past but not since living in the area. I met a man who cares so much about local sustainability, he’s tending a rice paddy in Vermont. I enjoyed the hospitality of homesteaders who offered me a taste of a roasted roadkill grouse hit by their truck on I-91 (at Exit 7 well within 100 miles.) That night, I enjoyed delicious dark purple mashed potatoes from two pounds pulled out of their field.

All the food I ate that week came from a garden, from my local food co-op, or directly from the farmer. In the last case, I enjoyed my food after several minutes of talking to the farmer, an experience not possible at the supermarket.

How much will the experience affect my eating habits the other 51 weeks of the year? On Day 8 for breakfast, I ate Vermont-made cheese, a tomato from my CSA, basil from my garden, and the last bit of spelt bread. Officially, I was no longer a localvore. I washed it down with a tall, welcome glass of my fussy German seltzer and cranberry juice.

I rejoice that one of the delights of our modern world is variety in foods. I am not giving up citrus in January and persimmons. Trade isn’t a bad thing; it can be fair and promote the exchange of culture and ideas. But after a week of a local diet, I am infinitely more aware of the choices I can make to balance what is good to eat with what is “good” in other ways. And that was well worth seven days without salt.