Gray has Full Tilt tattooed on his knuckles. It is appropriate for some of the activities we partake in including a recent round of apple cider pressing.

Gray, Noel, and the current WWOOFers Liz and Tanya gathered apples from our tree, loading up a couple of giant coolers. From there the apples went to a neighbor’s shop and into a janky old cider press. Our neighbor Kathryn started everything off with a quick wash down of the press.

The press is another neighbor’s (Ned) machine. He told that he bought it for $300 thirty years ago. According to a handy inflation calculator, that would be about $800 today. Oh, and it was used when he bought it, so who knows what it originally cost.

Ned oversaw the first few rounds of pressing, staying just long enough to collect a quart of raw cider.

Gray did most of the first pressings, and I took over after that. In the humidity and falling sun, the work was sweatier than it would be in the Fall when folks are pressing their storage apples. Along with all the grass clippings, twigs, bugs and leaves that ended up in the press, I’m sure we added a few drops of sweat during the work.

The way the press works is pretty basic. You load the hopper, a motor drives some metal plates together and crushes the apples into an open wooden bucket. The bucket is made up of spaced slats of wood. The full bucket is moved down to the press, which is cranked down onto the apples. The juice runs down into a small container at the end of the press.

From there the cider is filtered, the smashed up apples removed from the press and the process started over again.

I think we did about 25 gallons that night, finishing up after the light of the day had been and gone.

By then it was time to drink up some samples and head back home.

When I left Wilmington, I generated a new version of the 100 mile diet circle.  Gone is the vast expanse of salt water; in is a nice chunk of rural Virginia and a bit of country in South Carolina.  Many of the farms included in the old map are still in the new map.  After all, I did stay in the same state.

All that said, I have to admit that my local food habits hit a rut when I first moved.  I was eating peanut butter and canned crap for a good four week period before I realized that I was missing out on what the new circle held.  I started eating five mile salads and thirty mile meats.  Locally grown and milled flours, grits and rice made their way back onto the table.  I also found my way back into a box of Carolina Ruby sweet potatoes.

Through Eastern Carolina Organics, I also have access to produce from the entire state of North Carolina, from Valle Crucis to Ivanhoe, Edenton to Hurdle Mills and back to Bakersville.  Occasionally things get culled due to poor quality and I of course get my hands in the boxes just like back in Wilmington.  My scavenging eyes are returning and – without my staff discount from the coop – I am looking for ways to slim down the food budget.

Basically what I am getting at is that I am back in the food bubble.  I am also looking forward to producing more of my own food in the coming year.

The photo shows a stereotypical farmer, plaid shirt and overalls front and center. In the background, a table full of young professionals gathered around a laptop. Welcome to the new picture of a locavore…

An article in the New York Times details a growing trend in local eating, a trend that many would call the Lazy Locavore movement. More to the point, this trend is based on disposable income more than laziness, and injects an unneeded class distinction into local foods.

The article picks up the false argument that local food always costs more, therefore it should be in the realm of the upper classes to purchase it or have it grown for them. Installed gardens (with maintenance packages), home deliveries of pre-cooked local stews and personal chefs may unnecessarily become the new faces of local eating. Attempts to build community based, income-irrelevant food systems have to stay above the class divide and focus on ways to bring local eaters together and make local food attainable to anyone who wants it.

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 try and eat a pretty good breakfast during the work week, but the meal is often scattered over the course of a few hours. It isn’t until Sunday that I get to have a good sit down breakfast at a most unreasonable hour of the day (breakfast at noon?). Tomorrow I am looking forward to a big pile of pancakes, a pile of bacon, a pile of scrambled eggs with sweet peppers and goat cheese, a pile of blueberries, a pile of melon, a pile of toast and jam and butter, a pile or rice and honey — just huge piles of breakfasty stuff inches from my coffee rinsed eyes.

I didn’t always have a good relationship with breakfast. During most of my working life (read: most of my life) I have skipped breakfast entirely, preferring to start the day with a billion ounces of various caffeine shots. When I was an apple inspector for the USDA my breakfast was a Jolt cola and a half dozen cigarettes. When I packed trucks in a shoe factory, my breakfast was the yammering on of the forklift driver and a gallon of coffee. When I…well, you get the point.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I really started to get into breakfast as the basis for the day. I would start making rice in the morning and pairing it with various preserves or pour a big bowl of crunchy granola and top it with berries. Or fry up some eggs and potatoes and have at it.

On occasion breakfast became some sort of calming mechanism. Afterwards I’d listen to local morning radio or read a farming magazine or pet the cats. Then on to work in a relaxed state of mind.

Breakfast changed my life so much that I kind of like to eat it for dinner sometimes as well. “Breakfast for Dinner” is a pretty well used phrase around here, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. So yeah, I’m looking forward to breakfast tomorrow…