PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
By Pam Pritzl
EATING LOCAL FOOD
May 2008
Two books I read over the last year have made me realize that eating local foods is important for all of us to consider. Animal, Vegetable and Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and Plenty by Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon both describe a year of eating local foods month to month. Kingsolver and her family live on a farm in Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains, where they grow their own produce and raise poultry. Smith and MacKinnon live in a one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver, B. C. and grow some of their food in a nearby “pea patch”. Both families buy their food from farmer’s markets and other local sources.
Eating local foods helps support local farmers, the local economy and the environment (by cutting down on the fuel used to transport food). Farmers markets are now open and offer a good variety of fresh produce and other local products. One can also sign up for a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription; boxes of fresh vegetables and fruit are delivered to your doorstep.
Another way to eat locally is to grow your own fruits and vegetables. I grew up on a farm where we had a large vegetable garden and raised most of the food for our family. We now have a large garden at our home on Camano Island; I put up preserves and pickles for us to enjoy throughout the year and we freeze raspberries to use on our cereal in the winter months. After reading Animal, Vegetable and Miracle, I canned a box of eastern Washington peaches last fall. This year, I plan to preserve two boxes of peaches and make several batches of marinara sauce from those delicious eastern Washington tomatoes that can be purchased locally in the summer.
If you buy and use locally grown ingredients and seasonally available foods you could call yourself a “locavore.” Combining the Latin words locus (place) and voro (eat), locavore was recently selected by the Oxford University Press as the “word of the year.”
The Local Farms—Healthy Kids legislation was recently signed into law in our state. This legislation will help schools purchase locally grown and locally prepared fruits and vegetables so that kids can eat better.
When making food choices, try to put local foods at the center of your diet and think about where has the food come from and how was it produced.
Don’t forget to take your cloth shopping bag with you when you visit those farmers markets.
Good eating and good birding to all of you.
