The PeakReady Blog

Personal Peak Prep - Buying Local

• Posted by e4 on December 4th, 2007 filed in Food: Growing It, Food: Preparing It, General

This guest post is about the personal activities and preparations of someone who’s name you might recognize, but who wishes to remain nameless here. I’ve separated it into multiple posts based on topic.

–

Buying Local:

Of course, the most local you can buy is from your own garden, and we did put up our first stab at that. We also signed up and picked up from a smaller, more local CSA than the one we joined last year, which was about twice the distance of this one. Our goal is to find one we can walk to, but with this one, we still have a ½ hour drive. That has got to change.

We joined a food co-op as well, and get a delivery of food to our neighborhood once every three weeks. This provides the canned goods that the farming CSA can’t. But truly all the plastics, even in the larger qualities, sickens me to buy. I would pay more to buy them in glass, because I could store things in the used containers that way. I’ve gone to yard sales and cut up old towels that I’ve been using in place of plastics in the microwave or to bring food over to someone else’s house. Every bit of plastic I use and toss out, now, actually pains me in the heart. I wince. This is a good thing.

I do go into a supermarket once in a while, for a few items, but it is usually only 4-6 times a year. It is now a very odd experience. I see all the ‘perfect’ out of season fruit, the aisles of foods like sodas and frozen pizza that I don’t eat. I marvel at how our culture has both been able to provide so much so cheaply, and at the same time, see that $2.00 chicken breast alongside the image of those poop-stained live birds crushed into each other. I look at cereals that have no fiber, only sugar. Yes, I actually read the labels, even though I have no intention of buying them, because I know those hyperactive kids walking around are eating that crappola…every morning. I look at what people have in their carriages, as if they are from a different culture, and they are, in truth. I read through the circulars and see how many things I’d never THINK of buying, and I don’t feel alienated from my culture, I feel sad for the people. No one needs to grate cheese anymore. It’s done for you. It all feels a bit like a freak show at the circus, and I know I shouldn’t be so morbidly curious about it all, but I am. I want to know who these “Oscar Mayers,” “Tyson’s” and “Plumrose’s” are. I’ve gotten so used to seeing the animals I eat in the fields, grazing, with their babies, knowing which bulls get to live another year to be sexual and which don’t, that I can’t bring myself to trust these ‘Titans of Industry.” I know the CEO’s don’t have to work other jobs in order to keep farming, like my cattle-farmer does. I know those “Hood” cows don’t get to rest all winter, free of the milking machine’s constant tugging on them. These animals have stopped being animals to our agribusiness, and we’ve stopped being grateful humans eating them. We are all just different parts of the great machinery, at one end being fed into the shoot, and on the other end paying then, driving home in our fossil-fuel tankers, stuffing them into our fossil fuel run appliances, then into our faces.

My husband learned to fish, and catches fish right here in town. The waterways are still stocked for salmon, so we have no illusions that this will continue endlessly, but it still is a skill he’s learned.

We get all of our eggs from our own chickens, and selling to neighbors allows us to buy feed and break even, so our eggs are free. We buy our lamb & beef from farmers an hour’s drive away too, and it’s grass-fed and top quality. We take the drive twice a year now. We are looking for more local sources, and we have a few leads. Pork is our next purchase locally, but we haven’t made it yet. In our area, grazing animals is making good use of our rocky mountainous terrain, and is a good food source. We’ve cut back on the amount of animal products we eat, but I doubt we’ll ever cut it completely out of our diet. I’m a big fan of the Paleo diet and am healthiest on it and have an allergy to wheat or related grains.

Chickens are eating locally, too, from a farmer that tries to get as much of the grain from local sources as possible. He ships it to an even more local source that charges me a small amount for handling. The feed costs less than the commercial stuff and the chickens like it better, too.

–