This post is part of the week long Eat Carolina Food Challenge where participants are asked to submit a blog post every day of the challenge. Posts from all the other participants are aggregated on the Carolina Farm Stewardship website.

Flat tire — check. Torrential downpour — check. Lightning — got it. Bike basket full of melting ice cream — unfortunately, got that too. With that setup, let’s start today’s post…

It hasn’t rained here for awhile. In what is amounting to a continuation of last year’s drought, we begin our days scanning the weather reports and hoping for the best. Any sign of clouds is cheered, any drizzle welcomed as, well, something at least, a sign that the atmosphere is at least still capable of recycling evaporated water into rain. Yet when it does rain I am usually cursing because I am most likely somewhere on my bicycle. It just seems to work out that way.

I am a bicycle commuter, so it has to happen that the commute occurs no matter what the weather conditions. If it isn’t humid it’s cold; if it isn’t windy it’s burning hot. And since I commute, whatever food I buy must stand up to at least thirty minutes in the elements, just like me.

Today we received a shipment of ice cream from Maple View Dairy. I had my eye on the pints from minute one, and decided to bring home all five flavors. The logistical nightmare for keeping ice cream cool is figuring out how to pack an extra bag of ice in the rear bicycle basket along with everything else. Today the “everything else” included the dishes from today’s lunch, a gallon of water, a package of bacon from Rainbow Meadow, a few veggies and my rain gear.

The clouds had been blackening as the seconds to my departure ticked on. I usually ride really fast, but downpours bring visibility to zero and severely extend the ride time. The clouds made me rethink the ice cream, but the thought of an after dinner bowl full of Carolina Crunch overruled rational arguments.

With everything wrapped up, clouds coming full on and the snap of thunder making its first appearances, I set the pace of a maniac, two wheels smoking, racing towards a dying sun. Perfect.

Then a flat tire. Then the realization that there wouldn’t be time to fix it properly before the storm came in full. Then the irritating thought of putting on non-breathing full-body rain gear in the saturated hot air. It always feels like a punch in the face to greet the humidity with full sleeves and hood.

The rain came hard. My back stung under the fat and fast drops. My glasses immediately fogged, becoming useless for navigation. Visibility was less than ten feet anyway, so I had to ride slowly and carefully. Street drains immediately clogged because it hadn’t rained in so long, the flotsam of a litter bug culture plugging up the grates. In some areas the water was too deep to even ride through. An hour later I was on my porch pouring water out of my waterproof boots (that just means the boots hold the water IN) and checking on my cargo.

The label on the bacon had washed away. The tomato had a soft spot. The gallon of water - well, who cares about that after riding through thousands of gallons of the stuff. The ice cream was the important part of this story anyway, and it had melted halfway. Tragedy and arrogance. I could have sent the pints home with a friend in a vehicle or just waited a day, but I had to have Heath Bars and Butterfingers and caramel sauce bathed in hormone-free sweet cream.

I tried to refreeze the ice cream slowly in hopes of fending off ice crystals. Hopefully it worked, but I’ll let you know after I down a couple bowls of hot homemade chicken soup (made from a Grassy Ridge chicken). Ride on…

This post is part of the week long Eat Carolina Food Challenge where participants are asked to submit a blog post every day of the challenge. Posts from all the other participants are aggregated on the Carolina Farm Stewardship website.

Socks for Supper, a children’s book written in 1978 by Jack Kent, was my first introduction into an alternate economy. I was four years old when it came out, and it was shortly after that that I received a copy of the book. Although I don’t have the original, I still keep a copy and try to read it to the kids I hang out with. It is a great story and can lead to some great discussions.

The book tells the tale of a poor old couple with nothing to eat but a bunch of turnips. They are glad for the turnips, but they are relatively boring when eaten day after day. They look upon their neighbors’ cow and think of the milk and cheese that they would love to have. Since they don’t have any money, they decide to offer a trade of red socks for some dairy products. The neighbors accept and soon the old woman is taking apart the old man’s red sweater in order to make more socks to trade for more milk and cheese. Soon the old man is sweaterless, and the old woman has only enough string for one sock. The neighbor woman is happy to get the one sock; it is just what she needs.

The neighbor has been secretly using the socks to knit a sweater for her husband. The sweater ends up being too big for the man, so, noticing that the old neighbor is now shirtless, she offers it to him. It fits perfectly of course and everyone has a good laugh…

Where I work, an older couple sells me vegetables off and on during the year. When they come to the store I sometimes send them home with a few potatoes that have gone green or some other produce that still has a use. Over the course of the season they plant the potatoes and harvest enough for the two of them for the year. They will occasionally bring me something. Today they brought me a fig tree, a youngster rooted from an established tree. Within a few years the tree will be producing fruit.

We have provided each other with the means to get food (provided the tree doesn’t die or the potatoes rot out) and established the basis for a gift economy between us. There are no expectations from each other - I often have nothing to send them home with and they don’t bring me trees every week. We have created something new between us that has the ability to resist cooptation.

If we aren’t careful, local eating has the possibility of becoming just another mindless consumer trend. The focus becomes the label instead of what is behind it - real food; family run farms; the basis for a new type of economy, a blend of the free market and the barter market; Community Supported Agriculture; sustainable agriculture schools. We, as the eaters and champions of local food, need to keep community, farming and alternative food systems at the forefront and keep the term locavore above the consumptive abyss.

We need more versions of socks for supper and the patience to defend those simple transactions.

This post is part of the week long Eat Carolina Food Challenge where participants are asked to submit a blog post every day of the challenge. Posts from all the other participants are aggregated on the Carolina Farm Stewardship website.

At about a pint a day, I have eaten enough blueberries this year to earn my keep in the produce department. And that is just from the commercial berry producers. I haven’t even had time to go picking on the abandoned blueberry farm or the various wild patches scattered around the city.

This time of year is perfect for folks who like to stay cool by burying themselves in fruit, and by bury I mean eat a whole lot of it. If all you ate was fruit, you would have a hard time going hungry right now. Blueberries are going strong and are at peak sweetness. Galia melons are cracking with sugar, giving off their sweet bubblegum smell, practically daring you to eat the whole thing. Blackberries bring the tart while watermelons bring the grass covered in “discarded” seeds, thrown out of people’s mouths by physics and festival contests. Then there are honeydews, charentais, sugar babies, crenshaws, casabas, moon and stars. And of course the fruits that most people don’t think of as fruit - tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers to name a few.

This is also the perfect time of year to interact with farmers. The markets are in full swing, the deliveries are flowing, the sun is out and the heat of the afternoon provides an excuse to lay off the work for awhile and chat. After the wagon is unloaded of course…

Pictured - Julian Wooten (left) from Southwest Berry Farm and Trace Ramsey from Tidal Creek Cooperative Food Market. Photo by Jessica Ashcraft.

This post is part of the week long Eat Carolina Food Challenge where participants are asked to submit a blog post every day of the challenge. Posts from all the other participants are aggregated on the Carolina Farm Stewardship website.

I am not a food separatist; I often find myself staring at piles of food wondering how they all could fit together in one dish. I am fond of soups and casseroles, and I would really like to get more into creating variations of bibimbap. One pile of food in a bowl is perfect for me.

Last August I wrote about a spaghetti squash garbage plate meal that I prepared from a bunch of summer vegetables. For my first dinner with the Eat Carolina Challenge, I figured I would revisit the premise and get all the ingredients into a pile and into a bowl (and into my mouth). The idea is pretty basic - just throw a bunch of stuff together that you think would taste good together. Throwing together things that don’t taste good together is bad news. Don’t do that.

For tonight’s dinner, I started with a pound of ground beef from Nooherooka Natural. To that I added some new potatoes, lavender bell pepper and garlic from Black River Organic Farm. To that mixture I added a handful of grape tomatoes from the same farm as well as a couple of spoonfuls of Pepper Dog Medium salsa.

Lastly I threw in a box of “expired” organic mac and cheese (I am known around here as a food scavenger) made with Maple View milk and butter. I topped it all off with some chipotle goat cheese from Nature’s Way, and I had a concoction that looked a bit like dog food but tasted a whole lot better.

This will also be my lunch at work tomorrow, making the challenge just a little bit easier…