Learning from Eat Local Challenge
It's unfortunate that eating local has to be a challenge. Foods coming from close to home seem more natural choice, but since we live in an age of processed food and transportation, it's cheaper to produce with cheap foreign ingredients and industrialized food system. Price tag is especially a determining factor in recession.
We ate lots of vegetables. Main source of starch was taro and sweet potatoes. surprisingly enough if we look hard enough there are plenty of local source of vegetables. Some are not organic and hard to tell if the farms are conventional style. We can't look up.
Sometimes farmers don't bother to change a few little details to be certified organic. As long as people know that I don't use any chemical fertilizers and pesticides and non-GMO, etc, then most people are fine with it. Basically organic but not strictly to the NOP rule. often times they have lots of details that NOP organic rules don't allow such as field design, compost prep, amendment sources and ingredients, animal use in the field, etc...
At least, what matters the most is visibly natural than industrial organic on paper.
I had our farm tea after every meal which gave me peace of mind however unsatisfying the meals were. Since we drink tea after every meal, it became the way to conclude our meal time. It somehow gives a moment of peace and satisfaction. I noticed that there were lingering unsatisfied feeling of not having rice and certain spices like black peppers and shoyu, but tea just removed all the discomforting feeling temporarily.
Vegetables were plentiful between local farmers and our own garden. Our garden was not very well maintained since we put more effort in tea field and getting ready for new baby being born, but still had 5-10 different kinds of vegetables and herbs ready for harvest.
Vegetables from garden.
Taro, Sweet Potatoes, Carrot, Turnip, Green Onion, Komatsuna, Mizuna, Okinawan Spinach, Edible hibiscus, kale, lettuce,
Herbs
Rosemary, thyme, basil, ginger, turmeric, oregano, chives, lemon grass, garlic chives, parsley, ....
there are more wild vegetables growing here and there in jungle style like Fukuoka seedball style. like mustard and daikon, kabocha are found occasionally.
Challenge
Real challenge of eating local was not eating processed foods and convenient foods. Like noodles, snacks, canned stuff, prepared meals, etc. We just had to spend more time in the kitchen which took 2-3 hours more time each day. Instead of eating cereal or oatmeal, or rice, we just had to cook full meal.
Perhaps it's also a challenge to not just eat local, but natural and home prepared foods may reveal something else. If I lived in Japan, where I come from all the things I normally consider healthy diet can be obtained locally and even my family grows rice and various vegetables there so it's not the matter of local=healthy. The equation changes completely.
Why do we have to insist on local food only? I remember my grandmother telling me that she could live longer when I offered her some exotic vegetable ingredients because she thought by eating more variety of things she is balancing her diet and not being monotonous.
Anyway, I felt a lot of "why do we have to do this eat local challenge?" while actually still doing local ingredients only and pretending to feel good about eating local. Since I have a difficulty believing eating local is genuinely for good cause. Other than bragging rights, is there much more to be
Eat local movement is good for securing local food source, and finding out how much local ingredients are available for consumption for casual shoppers (non-gardeners), but we shouldn't mistake for only Local=healthy. Moreover, developing healthy local food culture seems important to get us healthy and also to create healthy network of local supply of food ingredients and being ahead of corporate take over.
I might have complained about not having rice daily, but I wasn't going to quit. Everybody else was more than ready to quit. I think only a few spices and oil was the only things that wasn't local.
While my living off the land experiment for 2 months was more about securing available food of any kind like I start to think like starving wild animal in a forest, this eat local challenge seemed more about realizing what would happen if we didn't have what we have.
We ate lots of vegetables. Main source of starch was taro and sweet potatoes. surprisingly enough if we look hard enough there are plenty of local source of vegetables. Some are not organic and hard to tell if the farms are conventional style. We can't look up.
Sometimes farmers don't bother to change a few little details to be certified organic. As long as people know that I don't use any chemical fertilizers and pesticides and non-GMO, etc, then most people are fine with it. Basically organic but not strictly to the NOP rule. often times they have lots of details that NOP organic rules don't allow such as field design, compost prep, amendment sources and ingredients, animal use in the field, etc...
At least, what matters the most is visibly natural than industrial organic on paper.
I had our farm tea after every meal which gave me peace of mind however unsatisfying the meals were. Since we drink tea after every meal, it became the way to conclude our meal time. It somehow gives a moment of peace and satisfaction. I noticed that there were lingering unsatisfied feeling of not having rice and certain spices like black peppers and shoyu, but tea just removed all the discomforting feeling temporarily.
Vegetables were plentiful between local farmers and our own garden. Our garden was not very well maintained since we put more effort in tea field and getting ready for new baby being born, but still had 5-10 different kinds of vegetables and herbs ready for harvest.
Vegetables from garden.
Taro, Sweet Potatoes, Carrot, Turnip, Green Onion, Komatsuna, Mizuna, Okinawan Spinach, Edible hibiscus, kale, lettuce,
Herbs
Rosemary, thyme, basil, ginger, turmeric, oregano, chives, lemon grass, garlic chives, parsley, ....
there are more wild vegetables growing here and there in jungle style like Fukuoka seedball style. like mustard and daikon, kabocha are found occasionally.
Challenge
Real challenge of eating local was not eating processed foods and convenient foods. Like noodles, snacks, canned stuff, prepared meals, etc. We just had to spend more time in the kitchen which took 2-3 hours more time each day. Instead of eating cereal or oatmeal, or rice, we just had to cook full meal.
Perhaps it's also a challenge to not just eat local, but natural and home prepared foods may reveal something else. If I lived in Japan, where I come from all the things I normally consider healthy diet can be obtained locally and even my family grows rice and various vegetables there so it's not the matter of local=healthy. The equation changes completely.
Why do we have to insist on local food only? I remember my grandmother telling me that she could live longer when I offered her some exotic vegetable ingredients because she thought by eating more variety of things she is balancing her diet and not being monotonous.
Anyway, I felt a lot of "why do we have to do this eat local challenge?" while actually still doing local ingredients only and pretending to feel good about eating local. Since I have a difficulty believing eating local is genuinely for good cause. Other than bragging rights, is there much more to be
Eat local movement is good for securing local food source, and finding out how much local ingredients are available for consumption for casual shoppers (non-gardeners), but we shouldn't mistake for only Local=healthy. Moreover, developing healthy local food culture seems important to get us healthy and also to create healthy network of local supply of food ingredients and being ahead of corporate take over.
I might have complained about not having rice daily, but I wasn't going to quit. Everybody else was more than ready to quit. I think only a few spices and oil was the only things that wasn't local.
While my living off the land experiment for 2 months was more about securing available food of any kind like I start to think like starving wild animal in a forest, this eat local challenge seemed more about realizing what would happen if we didn't have what we have.
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