Here in the Pioneer Valley, we are blessed with CISA, and their tremendously successful “Be  a Local Hero” campaign, which has brought a lot of attention to buying local foods.  At Wheatberry, we’re one of a handful of food businesses that really focuses on serving fresh foods, bought from local farms (almost always organic farms, in our case).  If there are no tomatoes in the fields, you won’t find them on our menu – same for salad greens, asparagus, etc.  We have a summer CSA share and a winter CSA for the bakery, and work with local suppliers.  This past spring we were very excited to switch to using 100% local meats and cheeses in our sandwiches, and many of you know we’re a little bit busy growing local grains and beans.

We’re not perfect by any means, but we try darned hard, and every year is better (which is all we can hope for, I think).  We wish so much that there were more options for local eating, even in our unusually conscious community.  (It’s always a little shocking for us to travel.  When we were in VT last month, in apple country in the midst of apple season, the local grocer had apples from Chile.  Super depressing.)

So why eat local?  Why not eat asparagus from Chile year round, tomatoes from Florida, bananas from Costa Rica every week?  There are many answers of course, and some of them are very complex, but I’ll give you a few simple ones that speak to us the most.

If you buy food farmed locally, you help ensure that there will continue to be farms in your community.  This is deeply important on a number of levels.  The biggest is food security – if some day, the trucks stop barreling down the highway packed full of veggies (or those foods have become astronomically expensive), it will truly be a matter of survival for communities to have maintained enough farms to feed themselves.  It may not even take peak oil for this to happen – it’s important to remember that in the Great Depression, for instance, people in cities were literally starving, while folks in the country were poor but could at least feed themselves.  Beyond food security, if you want to live in a place blessed by beautiful landscapes of pastures, animals, and fields of food – invest in your landscape!  If you don’t support your local farmers, they will be replaced by subdivisions, have no doubt.  We are very blessed in the Pioneer Valley with farms, but we are plagued by high real estate prices.  Even farms that have been put into APR (agricultural protection – the state buys the development rights so the land remains farmland) are selling for over $1 million.

Then, there is the simple, beautiful pleasure of eating seasonally, which comes with eating locally.  We do put up tomatoes and dilly beans, so we will still eat those in winter, but for the most part our eating follows the seasons.  Nothing can really compare with the year’s first, much-anticipated tomato, warm from the sun and eaten right in the garden because you can’t wait any longer!  Or the year’s first tender asparagus, the first peas, the first butternut squash soup.  The “luxury” of these foods being always available robs us of the true pleasures of only having them some of the time.  Not to mention that these foods are offered to us by the earth when we need them – the cleansing, tonic greens of spring, the sweet, dense squashes of winter.

Lastly, there is so much to be said for knowing where your food comes from.  This speaks to us on so many levels.  I like being able to literally visit the farm to see how vegetables and animals are treated, how the land is being used, and who the people are.  We’ve made many friends at the farmer’s market, and I’m sure we’ll continue to do so!  Taking a walk through the farmer’s market or going to pick up your share at a farm is wholly unlike shopping for groceries in a store.  I find myself much more likely to engage in conversation – interested how other people prepare their veggies, where do they live, etc.  At the store, I’m pretty much in a frenzied dash to the door.  In my book, activities that promote human interaction are always a plus.

So!  Check out these books for inspiration.  And remember that eating local doesn’t have to be all or nothing.  We eat primarily local, but we do treat ourselves occasionally to exotic fruits or vegetables (bananas, avocados).  To me, the key words here are treat and occasional.  When we do buy these treats, I try to still buy them direct from the farmer, using www.localharvest.org.

Bon Appetit!

Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon   The originators of the 100-mile diet

Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables by Farmer John Peterson  The best resource we own on how to store and use all those odd veggies you may find in your CSA box.  Who knew that root veggies rocked?

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan  (Not specific to eating locally, but an important read about what America eats, and what we should eat instead.  My favorite “rule”:  If your grandmother couldn’t identify it as food, don’t eat it.)

Boston Locavores – if you’re in the greater boston area, these guys have a great list of local farms and CSAs.