The Eat Local Challenge: Day Three

It is closing in on 10pm and I think we’ve finally got those tomatoes in a submission hold. In the process, we have cried over onions, fretted over the implications of the garlic (so much!), and opened all the windows to deal with the pizza sauce fumes. I think we might have to start calling the kitchen the Situation Room.

As heroic as this may sound, I had a bit of a humbling realization in Whole Foods this evening. We stopped by to pick up an avocado, which in the Ramsland household is an essential accompaniment to leftover pizza. Sound weird? Trust me. Try it. Anyhow, we were rung up by a cashier who knows what we are up to this week. He looked at our avocado, almond butter, California grown figs, and Oregon honeycrisp apple, “I thought you guys were eating local.” But the apple! It is local! And the figs – we are trying a new fruit! This is all part of the Challenge, right?

Yup, but we can’t in all honesty pass this off as “eating local.” We didn’t seriously consider curbing our avocado consumption or considering what kinds of nut butters might be closer to our bioregion. And I am reminded of an article I read in Utne this spring about a couple in British Columbia who committed to eating only foods that grew within 100 miles of them. For a whole year. There were no exceptions for the avocado-on-pizza cravings. There was no ambiguity in matters such as Stumptown’s locally produced vs. locally grown dilemma. They found that since land values were so high in the Frasier Valley that there were low-profit starch crops such as wheat, potatoes, or corn. What did they do? They were a little bit hungry and paid a lot for local artisan cheeses.

Clearly, we are on the junior varsity team when it comes to local eatin’. The Challenge has its surprises, as when Austin noted that figs taste a lot like fig cookies. But it also has its remote and sunny refuges, which really are pretty great on a leftover pizza.