Eating locally and eating very well

By Dave Churchill (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, August 17, 2007

We had spent the afternoon scrambling around on a Vermont mountain trail and then picking our way up (and down) a boulder field that led to a summit 1,500 feet above. We never made the summit but we felt as tired as if we had. By the time we had checked in at our lodgings, getting something to eat had become a major priority.

My daughter, Caitlin, and I were on a five-day trip to check out several college opportunities (for her, that is).

We had added some time to our trip to enjoy the local scenery, which was rugged and beautiful, like most of New England. In other ways, though, Vermont had some differences, and one of those was the food.

More than perhaps any state I have visited, Vermont makes a virtue out of “locally grown.” While there, we didn’t just eat cheddar cheese. We ate Vermont cheddar. There seemed to be no plain old apples, only Vermont apples —not to mention Vermont honey, blueberries, vegetables and meats.

Our first college visit was in a tiny town on the border with New York, and when we checked in we had been advised that our dining choices would be limited due to the late Sunday evening hour. Directions to the few places that were open were vague, so we simply started walking down the main street to see what we could find.

As it happened, the first restaurant we came to had a sign in the window advertising its practice of cooking with locally produced vegetables, meats and cheeses. Perfect. We weren’t assured of good food, but we at least knew it would be interesting. We weren’t disappointed.

Caitlin declared the green beans the best she had ever had, and also enjoyed the “naked ravioli” — cheese and pasta filling without any surrounding pasta. The best, though, was dessert, with Vermont ice cream and cream puffs for her. I had cheese and rosemary dessert fritters — odd but, trust me, delicious.

It wasn’t a cheap meal, but I don’t think it was because of the locally produced ingredients — it was just a spendy place. The next day we grabbed lunch at a roadside farm stand — Vermont cheddar (again), a Vermont-made all-natural soda, local plums and — for me — an apple turnover baked on the premises. We spent less than $10, between the two of us. That evening, we had dinner at a small restaurant that cooked with locally grown organic vegetables.

I don’t write about these things because any of them is unique in and of itself. But the totality of the “local” experience in Vermont did add up to something special. Sure, it’s possible — and easy — in Vermont to eat California lettuce, Mexican fruit and Nebraska beef. But it’s very easy to choose the local alternatives, easier throughout that state than anyplace I can recall.

We see the beginnings of the same trend here in Minnesota and in Fergus Falls: Bluebird Gardens vegetables and Ploughshare Farm’s community supported agriculture vegetable program, Amor Pork, Home Ranch beef, locally raised buffalo. No doubt there are others I have missed. Minnesota has a long way to go, though, to match Vermont’s emphasis on local products.

There are obvious benefits to buying local food. For one, doing so breaks the petroleum chain. A typical head of California lettuce gets trucked thousands of miles to a Midwest distribution center, then trucked again from there to a grocery store, gas or diesel fuel burning the whole way. For more heavily processed foods — a TV dinner, for instance — the criss-crossing journeys of the component products add even more mileage.

And, of course, a much higher percentage of the money spent on local products goes into the pockets of local growers, who are more likely to spend that money in the local economy.

There is a downside. If one only wants to eat locally grown lettuce in Minnesota, there is a long gap between the last head harvested in the summer to the first one in the spring. Because lettuce doesn’t preserve very well, there won’t be any lettuce on the table all winter.

But lettuce is highly perishable. Most vegetables and meats can be preserved in one way or another. In doing so, we come to the second major drawback to eating locally, which is convenience. Preserving vegetables is hard work, it takes planning and labor, something most Americans are not accustomed to investing in their food.

Like almost every other aspect of our petroleum-dependent lifestyles, doing what may be right takes extra work.

We didn’t get where we are today — dependent on a high-energy, high-convenience lifestyle — overnight. We aren’t likely to go the other direction overnight either, even if we want to — even if the reality is that ever-scarcer oil is going to force us in that direction at some point.

There are no overnight answers. But it was encouraging to see what success Vermont has had in growing its locally grown food industry. And it’s exciting to think about Minnesota getting to the same place.

Journal publisher Dave Churchill’s column runs on Fridays.