Local eating in Wilmington is front page news! Thanks to Sam for a great article. If you want to see the picture of me in my kitchen you’ll have to buy the print version.

Movement to eat locally grown food gains momentum in Wilmington

By Sam Scott
Staff Writer
sam.scott@starnewsonline.com

Her kingdom for a carrot - so long as it’s locally grown.

For the past four months, Jessica Probst and her husband, Sal Marsico, have been on a culinary quest - to live on local foods as much as possible.

More…

I am not an expert, and I hope to never be one. The world has too many so-called experts and not enough people actually unafraid to fail. Failure provides education, something that cannot be taught by an expert or a textbook. It is a personal risk in the unknown and a strengthening process that makes the end product that much better. Many of the things I tried with this project have been miserable failures the first time around but are now successes. Through this process I hope to relay to you what is working and how things can be improved with local food.

I have been thinking about doing a presentation about local food, and now, with a new series of workshops, I get a chance to write it and break it out. This will be a good opportunity to start building a local foods community in Wilmington and elicit ideas on what that means to other folks. It will also be a good time to talk about what hasn’t worked with Cricket Bread, what the drawbacks are, where the support is minimal.

Some of the ideas I have for the presentation include defining our sources, discussing regional availability, settling on substitutions, preserving, basic foraging and scavenging, sample weekly menus based on the season, where to buy or find the basics, buying in bulk and my personal experiences with local food. Thanks to April and Jessica for helping me brainstorm a bit yesterday on the subject of “what would you want out of this workshop?” If you all have more ideas, please comment.

There are other short courses in this series besides the Seasonal Eating class. Contact Neal Taylor (info at bottom) about these workshops. All courses are in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Principles of Permaculture - 10/30/2007 6-7pm

This will be a more in-depth discussion of the principles from each of the two founders of Permaculture. We hope to give everyone enough background with this class that you’ll leave knowing some good starting places to implement Permaculture in your own place.

Starting Your Own Vegetable Garden - 11/6/2007 6-7pm

Want to know where, when, and how to get started with a vegetable garden of your own? This course will discuss different ways of building good garden soil, appropriate fertilizing techniques, options for layout and size, and recommendations for maintaining soil fertility.

Seasonal Eating - 11/13/2007 6-7pm

One of the best ways to decrease your “food miles” is to eat foods that are in season and grown locally. In our climate, that also means learning to preserve that fresh food so it’s available at other times of the year. This course will introduce ways to gear your eating habits to the seasons and how to can, freeze, dehydrate, etc. those summer crops that you want to enjoy in winter! (Guest Speaker - Trace Ramsey)

Natural Building - 11/20/2007 6-7pm

With everyone talking about green building these days, why not take it to the extreme? Natural building is sustainable, with low embodied energy, using materials found locally. Whether it’s cob, straw bale, timbers, or thatch, this is a building option that is beautiful and easy on the Earth. This presentation will focus on a straw bale project in Raleigh, with examples from other parts of the country as well. (Guest Speaker - Brent Bishop)

All courses will be held at Tidal Creek’s Community Room, above the Co-op. The topics are subject to change, but I will email everyone a week before each class to confirm the topic and/or guest speaker. The fee will be $20 per class, or $50 for all four classes. Please respond to this email or call Neal with the class(es) you would like to attend so we’ll have the facilities in order. We are also organizing classes and workshops after the holidays for all the other topics from the survey, especially indoor gardening, beekeeping, and passive heating and cooling designs. Thanks again, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Neal Taylor
One World Design
oneworlddesign -at- ec.rr.com

Sunburn, parking ticket, no fish…if our previous fishing adventure was a lesson in all the things that can go right, the latest attempt was a lesson in the things that can go wrong.

Not that it was a bad day by any means. Spending four hours at the beach, standing in nice warm water on a cloudless fall day, throwing a line into the depths and simply not thinking about anything in particular; what could be so bad about that?

I am learning more about the salt water fishing thing with each trip. Catch quotas, the types of fish to catch with which type of bait, what would be really nice to catch and what isn’t worth the effort.

As with our first trip, Noel ran the cast net and pulled in the bait fish. Hopefully I can step up soon and earn my own bait. It looks easy enough, but I am still getting the hang of throwing the line as far out as I can. As with everything else, there are baby steps and I am soaking everything up and just letting it wear on me.

Even with a pretty consistent supply of bait fish, we just couldn’t find where the fish were biting. We saw plenty of large fish in the area; they just weren’t interested in committing to an evening on the dinner plate. I learned that sometimes you come home with an empty bucket, and there isn’t a thing wrong with that.

The waste stream week is over, and I feel it was pretty successful. The final meal was some out-of-date turkey bacon and a couple fried eggs made into sandwiches. No salad tonight, mainly because I did not bring home any vegetables that go well on a salad.

I still have a couple of brown artichokes and a burly looking rutabaga to cook. They can wait until tomorrow or the next day; I’m not in a hurry with those.

Overall this has been an interesting experiment. It has reminded me that I can go quite a while without buying groceries or relying on the food stashed away in various cupboards. More than anything else it became a project on relearning some survival skills. This is never a bad thing. The fact that the grocery bill was zero dollars for the week is an added perk.

The waste stream is not a solution to anything. The waste stream will not feed tons of hungry people unless it were managed with numbers in mind and included a dedicated group of people. If anything, the waste stream is a reminder of the excess that our current economic model creates day in and day out. It speaks to an exploitation of resources and indicates that we waste food simply because we can. All the energy that goes into producing, harvesting, transporting, storing, boxing, unboxing, etc is lost as soon as the product goes into the trash. Sure, folks are paid during every step of the process, but you can’t eat a paycheck and hope to get any nutritional value from it.

What am I trying to prove? Basically I am saying that we can eat well balanced meals out of the trash. I am saying that we should be mindful of our waste and take responsibility for it. I am saying that we should reincorporate food waste back into the system that brought it to market - get it back to farm workers, integrate it into new food, anything to keep it out of the landfill where it will be buried and sequestered from the nutrient cycles. Compost the leftovers that went bad instead of throwing them in the trash can. Disregard all the warnings about not putting oils, fats and meat in the compost pile. The critters will dig for it and aerate your pile or, if they don’t, those things will all break down just like any other organic matter. Cooked food decomposes just like vegetable scraps, maybe even faster.

Take responsibility for your waste…