We planted the garlic in November of last year, some six or so pounds of it, enough to get almost to the end of the row. After a couple of mulchings, the garlic is beautiful. And scaping. In order to promote the growth of the underground bulb, the scapes are removed. Scapes can be used in cooking for their light garlic flavor or fermented. We picked all the scapes and handed them over to Adah for fermenting, but not before Kristin grabbed a handful to throw in with some beet greens she was cooking.

Basically all you have to do is pull on the scape to remove it from the plant. Most just break off where they emerge from the stalk. Others come all the way out leaving you with a nice piece of tender goodness.

The harvest went quickly, the two of us filling a five gallon bucket in about ten minutes.

After the scape harvest, it was on to planting ginger. In early March I went to a ginger workshop put on by East Branch Ginger and Debbie Roos of the Chatham County Cooperative Extension. At the end of the workshop everyone received a few pounds of seed ginger. After pre-sprouting the ginger behind our woodstove and in the greenhouse, it was finally ready to plant. The pre-sprouting gives the ginger a head start.

In order to control fertility (ginger is a heavy feeder) and water, we are growing the ginger in our old chicken feed bags from Reedy Fork Farm. The bags provide great drainage as well as easy hilling. Ginger is hilled three times – once when the base of the shoots turns from bright white to bright pink, a second time four to six weeks later and a third time four to six weeks after that.

Our soil mix consists of Sunshine potting mix, feathermeal, leaf mold, worm castings and mycorhizzal granules. We get the potting mix and feathermeal from Chatham Farm and Home Supply. They have bulk feathermeal from North Carolina sources, making it cheaper and more local for us. The fungus comes from Mushroom Mountain in South Carolina and the worm castings come from Carolina Worm Castings who make their compost in the building next door to ECO.

We hope to harvest eight to sixteen pounds of ginger this fall. This is a big experiment, but I can easily see myself getting sucked into this big time.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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…

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.

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.

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…

I go to the conference every year, and, win or lose, this year will hopefully be no exception. I’m looking forward to hearing Joel Salatin speak and maybe get him to sign my copy of his newest book, Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal. Yeah, I’m a farmer nerd. I’m still wondering where I can get a life size, color, cardboard cutout of Alex Hitt like I saw on the back porch of Eco Farm.

The Eat Carolinas Challenge has been featured in the Wilmington Star News as well as a number of press outlets throughout North and South Carolina. It has brought locavores out of the woodwork, and it is exciting to see that many of the participants have been eating locally for quite awhile.

This challenge will bring some change to the way I eat. I will go beyond the usual 100 mile radius and explore the reaches of the Carolinas. This will most likely mark a transition to a more regionally based locavorism on my part. I had planned to tighten my radius to 50 miles when I move to Silk Hope (finally) next month and be on my way to a nice tight 35 mile radius next Spring. Whether or not that will happen is not really debatable at this point. The idea of living within the smallest “foodprint” possible just makes sense to me in terms of community, energy and work.

More on all that later after I attempt to win this challenge…

Five Year Old Kid (grabbing a pint of blueberries): “Are they ‘ganic?”

Mom: “No, but they’re local.”

Five Year Old Kid: “Yay! Local!”

Maybe there is hope…

Knowing that I couldn’t come up with the full share price – but still wanting to participate – I asked Robb about the possibility of working off part of the share price. She considered it, and last Monday I ended up spending a few hours at her farm.

I pulled weeds, helped roll out row covers and cut up seed potatoes. I also took a bunch of pictures of a hawk that was watching me work. I don’t know if it was hoping I would stir up a mouse or what. It wasn’t interested in the fire ants biting my hand that’s for sure.

My tool of choice was the wire weeder, a light and quick weed killer that slices off the main plant from the roots. It also allows for precise cultivation between plants.

As I said, I put in at most two hours out the farm. From my research tonight, it looks like the going rate for CSA labor is between $4 and $6 per hour. I’ll shoot for the average and ask for $5 an hour. A few hours a week should get some of the share paid off. Even without compensation, the ability to get out of the city, hang out with hawks, hear turkeys and chickens and horses make their noises all around, and put your hands in the dirt…that has to be worth something.

Well, the first delivery came yesterday -

That’s what it is worth.  Yeah!

The pecan post generated the most comments out of any here on Cricket Bread (so far). During the first week the newsletter was out I was stopped in the store at least a few times every day just to talk about the articles.

Folks want to talk to me about the project, share a story about their experiences with food or offer some thanks on getting them to think differently about what they eat. These conversations are invariably short, and I am usually putting out fruit and vegetable stock when they spot me.

But I sense that these conversations are valuable in that I make this project approachable, tangible and human.

Most of the folks who come up to me have never said much to me besides the usual pleasantries. Those who know me know that, despite how much I like to share myself through writing, I am not a talker in person. I think this frustrates some people who might think they are going to get a great story out of me – you know, about the time I wrestled a deer to the ground and ate its liver or something like that. I hate to disappoint. I will offer up advice on farms, what is in season, how to cook what and so on in conversation, but I tend to do better with stories when I write them down or when I am with close friends.

All this said, I would like to get more comments here on the blog and get more back and forth going. I check the stats; I know ya’ll are visiting and spending a lot of time reading what I have to say, but I would like to know what you think about what I’m saying. Book, blog and website suggestions are also welcome as I tend to get focused on certain things and miss out on the million other things out there…

This past week the store started carrying meat from Rainbow Meadow Farms, a family farm right at the 100 mile mark in Snow Hill, NC. The first delivery consisted of a dozen pastured turkeys. I brought home a fourteen pounder to cook for a holiday meal.

This would be the second turkey I have ever cooked, and the first truly local one. Last year at Thanksgiving I cooked an organic bird from who knows where. I missed an opportunity to get a local turkey this Thanksgiving, but was glad Tidal Creek finally got a delivery system in place for Rainbow Meadow.

I cooked both turkeys “upside down”, meaning the breast faces down in the pan instead of the traditional way of roasting the bird with the breast up. The effect of cooking the turkey breast down is that all the juices from the roasting flow down into the breast. This is a good thing.

1 – Let the turkey sit out (in its wrapper) for an hour or so. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees near the end of the hour.

2 – Wash the turkey, remove the neck and innards and pat the turkey dry. I don’t eat the innards (yet), but I saved the neck to make some soup stock later.

3 – Get the turkey into the roasting pan. Rub it with salt and either butter or olive oil.

4 – To the inside of the bird, add a couple chopped carrots, leeks, garlic, basil, thyme and rosemary.

The leeks and carrots are from Oakley Laurel CSA, the garlic from Black River Organic Farm and the basil from my garden. The other herbs were from the dumpster.

5 – Tie the legs tightly together so that the veggies don’t fall out.

6 – Flip the turkey breast side down, rub with salt and butter/oil and sprinkle with herbs.

7 - Here is how my turkey baking time came out – 400 degrees for a half hour, 350 degrees for two hours and 225 for one hour and fifteen minutes. I also turned the turkey over for fifteen minutes at 350 to slightly brown the breast. The two important cooking times are the 400 and 350 degree times. The 225 degree time will vary by the size of the turkey. Use an instant read thermometer to be sure. The temperature in the deepest part of the thigh should be over 165 degrees when fully cooked.

8 – After removing from the oven, let the turkey rest for at least fifteen minutes before carving.

9 – My method of carving is to just randomly cut pieces off. I really can’t give anyone advice on how to do it since I really don’t know what I’m doing. As long as good chunks of the meat come off, I’m happy. The rest can come off in soup.

There are still three of these local turkeys in the frozen meat section at Tidal Creek if anyone is interested…

I have been getting the boxes for the past five or six weeks. During this time I have received a lot of heads of lettuce, bok choy, green and red cabbage, sweet and bell peppers, carrots, shelled pecans, okra, beets, turnips, green and red kale, lacinato (dino) kale, leeks, dill, parsley and basil. I’m sure I have left something out, but everything has been great. It is great to be able to have a fresh salad every night of the week. The bok choy coleslaw that I made was from cabbage from Robb’s CSA. Last night a bunch of turnips and carrots went into some chicken soup that I pulled out of the freezer.

Yesterday I had a chance to go and visit the farm. Located in Castle Hayne, the farm is a quick ten minute drive from my house. That isn’t far compared to the other places that I buy produce from. Still, Robb had to come pick me up since I don’t trust riding a bicycle on no-shoulder roads.

Robb has tentatively named the farm Oakley Laurel. The farm’s main focus is on pasture management for raising and keeping horses. There are currently five horses on the farm. The pictures are of Eddie, a four year old horse. He was pretty friendly, constantly trying to eat my camera bag. I haven’t really been around horses that much, and I wasn’t sure if one was going to step on my foot or knock me over. I think horses are just a bit too big for my animal tastes. I much prefer goats and their scale. Goats are still friendly, and I think I could block a goat’s kick much better than a horses.

The pastures take up most of the eight acre farm, with about a quarter acre dedicated to the CSA garden. Robb rotates the grazing pasture every so often and removes most of the manure for composting. She also reseeds with various grasses in order to increase the density of forage and reduce the amount of hay she needs to buy.

The garden area is good sized for a small CSA. Robb wasn’t using every part of the plot and planned to expand the beds as the ground is worked. She is dealing with a shallow clay hardpan that has to be broken up before the roots have a place to go.

Robb uses multiple successive plantings to ensure variety in the CSA box. In one area there were mature lettuce heads and in another the seedlings had just been transplanted.

Plenty of cold weather brassicas – kales, cabbage, broccoli – as well as roots like turnips, carrots and beets.

With the drought that is plaguing North Carolina, Robb has taken to setting up a number of rain barrels to collect water from the barn roof. The barrels feed into drip tape and soaker hose run throughout the beds.

Besides the horses, there were also a couple of cats residing on the farm working to rid the place of moles and mice.

If you are interested in finding out more about Robb’s CSA, contact me and I will get you in touch with her.

The first is goat butter. I have been unable to find a source of local goat milk or local goat butter. So I bought a couple packages of Meyenberg goat butter from the co-op. This butter comes all the way from California. The food miles are pretty dense on that one.

The second is bread. The discipline I need to make my own bread is pretty lacking. After working, bike commuting and then making a from-scratch meal, I don’t yet have what it takes to get into making bread. When Stoneground Bakery closed I was at a loss. The freezer cache emptied quickly, and I had to buy some packaged bread. It sounds weird but it really takes less effort to go out and dumpster a bag of bagels than it does to bake bread three times a week. Call it a weakness or laziness or whatever. Add to that several failed attempts at making bread, and I am a broken local bread eater. It is not that I don’t have the stomach for effort. It is just that six months into this project I have not been able to break this chain and just make it happen.

Bread is a staple for me. It just has to be here, readily accessible and ready to eat. I was trying to set up a routine in the bread world. For now it will have to be from the dumpster or from the shelf. I consider this a failure on my part since I have covered most every other staple with a local source. If I can’t find it or make it I move on…except for bread.

Well, those are the two things. They are a pretty unsubstantial two things, but they are things I cannot live without at the moment. That is my confession…

I asked Noel to provide me with his knowledge, and we set out with borrowed fishing poles and a cast net. After a brief stop so that I could get a fishing license ($15, cash only which Noel had to spot me) we were off to the beach. We were lucky enough that a nice person gave us their already paid for parking pass as they were leaving. The pass was good for eight more hours, and Noel passed it along to someone else as we left a few hours later.

We had good luck with fishing as well. After getting the poles set up for live bait, we threw the cast net into the masses of mullet fish, bringing in dozens without really trying. After about thirty minutes of casting around, bluefish started biting and we caught six in a short amount of time. One ended up shaking itself off my hook, so we ended up bringing five home with us. Five was plenty for the day.

When we got home Noel showed me how to clean and scale the bluefish and gave me pointers on where the bones were and what to cut out. It was a quick and easy process, the fish being long dead and fairly stiff. The fish were frying in the pan mere hours after they were hauled out of the water.

Remove the head -

Clean out of the organs -

Remove the scales -

Wash the fish -

Ready to go -

The preparation was simple – flour, salt, pepper and a few eggs for the batter then simply frying the fish for several minutes on both sides. I never really liked fish when I was growing up, but I was basically forced to eat it since it was what was available. I did like this fish though more so since I had caught and cleaned it myself. It won’t be long before I go through the process again now that I know how it is done.

Breading -

Fry -

Enjoy -

After the meal was finished and everyone had gone home, I had some time to reflect on what had happened. To me there was no “well, it’s just a fish” moment. These creatures were just swimming around out there, living, when by chance they ate another fish that happened to have a hook in it. All that swimming around and living ended as they suffocated in a five gallon bucket, so that I and others could eat them. Those fishes sacrifice is important to me. If it breathes oxygen, then pause and thanks must be given when that life ends. I will feel the same with whatever it is that I kill, and I cannot diminish the fact that something gave up their existence so that I could continue mine.

I have made it of primary importance to know where my food comes from, but there is a great difference between buying a frozen and already processed chicken from Grassy Ridge and actually doing the killing and cleaning myself. But it is imperative that I get further into that process in order to understand it and also to proceed humanely and without waste, just as it should be. Thanks bluefish…

In many ways this project has nothing to do with the actual ingesting of food or finding out where that food comes from. Sure, these two things are integral to what Cricket Bread is about, but is there a more primary reason for the project? I could say food miles or reducing energy consumption or examining carbon footprints, but many of these equations don’t come out well when applied to local food. It can be argued that it is more energy efficient to ship large volumes of produce by train than it is to drive yourself to the farmers market and back. While this might be something for discussion in the wider food distribution debate, it isn’t necessarily what I am trying to get at.

Is this project about supporting a local economy that just happens to include a food component? I could answer yes every time I hand a farmer some cash at the Farmers Market or buy local honey at the co-op or visit a farm stand. But then again, we could say this is all about nutrition, taste and slow food preparation.

Yet another possible “why” is to challenge myself to learn things that are very new to me. I made no pretension that this project would be easy for me or easily replicable. Things like fermentation, foraging and simply reaching out to growers and producers that I haven’t spoken to before are making me stretch and grow as a cook, researcher and community member.

As for the diet itself, for the most part the first month and a half has been relatively painless. Most things are pretty easy when food is in abundance. We are in the early part of the summer and produce is available in quantity and variety. The Stash has given me ample time to adjust to the new diet paradigm, and I am having fun in the process. However, it is not winter and I am not relying on stored food and very basic meals to get me by. Winter will be a very different time for this project, a time that will require a bit more scavenging and certainly more creativity with fewer ingredients.

Maybe, at the heart of it all, I am asking questions about how we choose to live our lives and what we hope to get from all that is going on in those lives. If all we want is to work eight hours a day, battle traffic to and from, eat a microwave meal and watch television until bedtime, then I think the majority of us have it covered. But if that lifestyle is not satisfying, if it is leading to emotional problems, relationships disintegrating and dissatisfaction with the normal life, why cling to it? Why not challenge yourself to get out of the rut, take yourself by the shoulders, shake vigorously, and say, “What am I doing this for?” If there is no good reason, no justification for continuing, no answer that makes the least bit of sense, then move on.

So, at the end of all that, the answer to “why” is simply that the other way of doing things just wasn’t working out for me. I could not think of a good reason to continue down the path of a non-local diet, borrowing the seasons from distant places in order to serve up a nice looking dinner plate. That way of eating had to end for me, and I hope, on some level, it can end for you as well.

I am trying to shake off more and more civilization and domestication as I grow older. In many ways this is in sharp contrast to most of my generation, the vast majority of whom would be scared and grossed out if I offered up a handful of dandelions and called it lunch. To fear the wild and its food is to be disconnected and removed from the realities of what is out-of-doors. I learned that the hard way, after brief flirtations with the normal life.

The normal life is nothing of the sort; an amalgamation of the dream of getting ahead, of long working hours, of half-hearted friendships, of lightning fast meals prepared thousands of miles away. Food in the normal life is devoid of nutrition and might as well be considered a nuisance. Who has time to make a soup from scratch when there are so many other things demanding our time? You know, the important stuff, like television and instant messaging.

There is a disconnection going on, a food chasm of much greater importance to the health of the world than any compact fluorescent light bulb ever will be. Spread along the chasm are a growing number of folks after the same sort of ideal – locally produced sustenance within a community minded atmosphere. These are the folks that “normal” people would call crazies, but I would, and do, call my people.

I tried living in the normal world, in the disconnected way my parents raised me, to want a white picket fence, a garage door opener, a water softener and a cabinet mounted can opener. It all seemed fine to begin with – fresh out of college, moving to a

But I can’t live in that disconnected world anymore – carting home grocery bags full of packaged foods made from corn and soy fillers, grown for shelf stability and not nutrition, or taking useless synthetic vitamin supplements and waiting for the diseases of civilization – diabetes, high blood pressure, high levels of “bad” cholesterol – to invade my body so I can fix the problems with prescription medications. Maybe if we all ate a dandelion once in a while instead of a Hardee’s Chicken Biscuit, we’d be much better off -

“The [dandelion] leaves are more nutritious than anything you can buy. They’re higher in beta-carotene than carrots. The iron and calcium content is phenomenal, greater than spinach. You also get vitamins B-1, B-2, B-5, B-6, B-12, C, E, P, and D, biotin, inositol, potassium, phosphorus, magnesium, and zinc by using a tasty, free vegetable that grows on virtually every lawn. The root contains the sugar inulin, plus many medicinal substances.”

Source – Common Dandelion by “Wildman” Steve Brill

The plantation offers free shipping services to Wilmington. They also have a listing of places that sell their rice. Looking up my zip-code in their database, I was given a couple of options here in town. One turned out the be an antique store that was closed today and the other option seems to be a store that is now closed forever. Even in the age of the Internets, directory pages get outdated fairly quickly.

So, no local rice for now as I use some of the stocked rice in the cupboard. I’ll order some of the Carolina Gold tonight and hope for a quick turnaround in shipping.

All that said, there need to be some guidelines to keep me on track and keep things from getting muddy.

The rules:

1 – Anything currently in the cupboards is fair game. No sense wasting what has already been purchased. This includes all the trillion spices we have sitting around as well as the bulk cases of items like pasta and canned tomatoes that were purchased at various times during the past few months. Is this cheating? No, because what is there to cheat on with this project if we’re just going to throw away good food because of an arbitrary start date of the local diet? Which brings us to rule two…

2 – Anything that is going to be thrown away or has already been thrown away is fair game. A central issue in a local diet is the wastefulness of transporting food (for processing and packaging or simply to get it to your plate). If a piece of food has traveled several thousand miles and is now on its way to the dumpster (or is already there) and it is still in edible condition, why not take advantage of the opportunity? Rule number two is all about foraging and scavenging. Rule number two is NOT about hitting up every free beer tasting or art show with heavy Hors’doeuvres.

3 – The 100 mile boundary can have some flexibility with regard to staples such as wheat. Locally milled flour may not necessarily be from local wheat, so ingredients should be followed to their source as long as they are not tremendously outside of the 100 mile zone.

4 – Food should be from sustainable, organic or humane farms whenever possible. Seeking out these particular farms or gardeners will serve to reinforce their growing decisions, and this is pretty much the only type of food I want to put in my body – food from a trusted source.

5 – The duration of the diet is open ended but should be at least a lifetime.

That about covers it. If something sounds weird, let me know.