Beautiful early morning skies over the Charlottesville City Market.
locavore — n. A person who attempts to eat only foods grown locally.
A hot topic these days is eating locally — instead of eating foods that were shipped from around the world, locavores seek out the local options. Eating local food has a number of environmental benefits, not to mention the positive act of supporting small family farms. By buying local, you are supporting the farmers and other vendors you meet at the farmers’ market, as well as keeping your food dollars in your community. When you buy local, your money isn’t being spent on the trucks and gas that were used to haul in foods from other parts of the country.
Eating local makes a lot of sense. After all, why buy apples that were shipped to Virginia from the west coast or beyond when we have dozens of orchards right here in our home state?
One of my favorite books is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver. For one year, Kingsolver and her family ate only local foods in season. They either grew the foods themselves or purchased them from local people. That also meant that they gave up M&Ms, soda, chips, and most other junk foods. Month by month, the reader learns how the family ate foods that were in season or had been stored for later use. One surprise for them was that it was actually harder to feed themselves early in the summer than in the winter. Read the book to find out why.
Charlottesville's farmers' market is a bustling place on Saturdays.
I’ve read other books by people who limited themselves to a completely local diet, including Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100 Mile Diet by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon. While I admire their efforts, I will tell you honestly that my husband and I have decided that it’s unlikely we could be quite as dedicated to the cause. We do the best that we can, but we are not striving for perfection.
We get all of our meat and poultry from local farms, most of our eggs are local, and during the summer we’re nearly perfect with vegetables and fruits. Actually, much of our produce is grown 20 feet from our back door, so it doesn’t get any more local than that.
We also try to get things like pasta, tortilla chips, and bread locally too. Luckily, we don’t eat a lot of pre-packaged foods and tend to cook mostly from scratch, so it’s not like I need a local source for Oreos. (Although my children might beg to differ.) That said, I personally am not going to give up chocolate, which we all know doesn’t grow in Virginia. And I have two daughters whom I’m not going to make give up some of their favorite occasional treats.
I think that being a locavore has three main parts:
- Eating seasonally as much as possible.
- Cooking more and eating less junk food.
- Buying local foods — again, as with eating seasonally — as much as possible and reasonable.
Then there’s the issue of cost. The fact is, some things cost more when you buy locally. Just this morning, I was at Whole Foods debating over buffalo mozzarella cheeses — the local option cost $1.50 more per pound than the non-local option — before putting the local option in my cart. However, I will freely admit that I also bought broccoli and clementines from California. I want my family to eat as locally and seasonally as possible, but this is the time of year that I need to supplement with foods from warmer climates. My cut-off point is the borders of the United States — I avoid buying international produce except on extremely rare occasions.
I don’t think that perfection should be our goal, but that we should be more aware of what’s on our plates. I for one cannot imagine life without oranges, but obviously we can’t grow those here in Virginia.
What about you? Are you a locavore?
Photo credits: The Charlottesville City Market’s Facebook page.
