Conquering Vertigo

Living l'eat-a loca

Our decision to take the Locavore Challenge (purchase and eat food -- ideally organic food -- "sourced" within a 100-mile radius of your house) has turned into the Geography Challenge for Robin.

Ricky has embraced this with his usual enthusiasm for good food, and already seems to know more about it than anyone else. Truly, the man is a quick study. But he grew up in Europe, eating local, seasonal produce.

So here we are in Farmer's Markets and local grocers, inquiring as to the provenance of the asparagus. Reading the back of a bag of rice, I murmur to myself, "Is Fairfield between here and Sacramento?" Yes it is, so in the basket the rice goes.

We've bookmarked farmer's market web sites in Mozilla, and I'm starting to get the sense that anything you could reasonably want is in California. Not just in CA, but within a 100-mile radar sweep of San Francisco. Of course, Ricky's been telling me this for years.

The biggest hurdle is not finding the food locally -- or even educating Robin about what might be growing in Suisun City -- it is staying within the food budget. Organic grapes coaxed from vines along the Russian River by vestal virgins at midnight ain't cheap.

I've eaten peaches fresh from the tree on a warm day in Texas, picked an apple from an orchard in North Carolina, and shelled peas on a Kentucky farm. They tasted like the sunshine and rain were still inside them, not leached away by cans, processing, chemicals and long truck rides.

Trying to live the locavore way reminds me of an old Peanuts cartoon. Linus (I think it was Linus) is about to eat something, but pushes it away because the box say it is full of "ingredients."

Which brings us to the pet food trauma and another blog entry. Final note: The Times recently reported on a young East Coast locavore who strained sea water from the Atlantic Ocean to produce salt. I'm not there, yet.

posted by Woman In Love @ 10:00 PM