Now that it's over

Wednesday was the last day of our month-long eat local challenge. We had a tasty supper of hamburgers with the rest of our Polyface Farms ground beef, and made french fries with some of our potatoes.

Yesterday I went to the grocery store, intending stock up on all the things we'd been missing during the last month. During October my trips to the store were very straightforward: check the produce section for anything local (I rarely found anything), ignore the bulk foods, cereals, and dairy aisle, pick up cat food, toothpaste, toilet paper and other inedibles, and check out. This time, there was suddenly a dilemma: What now should I buy?

The bulk food section was pretty easy: no-brand corn chips, lentils, organic brown rice, almonds and walnuts. I felt fine about buying those; non-refrigerated, dry, nutrient dense foods (okay, maybe not the chips). I moved on to the produce section. Here, we still had a good supply of most of the foods we eat. I briefly admired the oranges, decided to check the farmer's market one more time for onions, and picked out a bag of organic carrots, grown in California and no doubt shipped cross-country in refrigerated trucks. I justified a browning bunch of bananas on the reduced price rack because surely they'd be thrown out the next day and just go to waste.

Now I was through the bakery and on to the dairy aisle. I knew we still had some cheese we'd frozen before the last month, and we wouldn't be buying milk or butter anytime soon because of a happy occurance earlier that day: I had finally gotten off the waiting list for a cowshare! At a farmhouse just outside of Harrisonburg I had signed papers, paid fees, and walked to my car with two half-gallon glass jars of milk while the cows grazed nearby along with chickens and frolicking goats. Nearly the top quarter of each jar was risen cream.

Back in the grocery store, I pondered the frozen vegetables. I had discovered earlier in the week that we had no frozen peas left from our garden. Which ones to buy? The cheap store brand? Look for something organic? Pull out packages and try to divine where the peas were grown? In the end I decided we'd just eat our own green beans instead.

Though our month was over, I left the store with a single bag of groceries, rather than the three or four that were standard prior to October. Yet we have plenty of food. Today and yesterday I've eaten barley, lentils, sugar, raisins, bananas, carrots, nutmeg, black pepper, dried italian seasoning mix, baking soda, cheese, cocoa powder, and bagels. I'll probably continue to eat those things. But I likely won't be buying other non-local produce (unless we can't find those onions!), pasta, milk, butter, yogurt, or flour. I want to try buying rice and oats in 50lb bags. I still buy fairly traded coffee, tea, and chocolate. Maybe someday I'll be ambitious enough to make mozzerella cheese.

Now, if I could get that greenhouse built and plant my orange tree. . .