A shopper's experiment: Can she really 'eat locally'?
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Armed with this slightly more expansive view of eating locally, I went to a local Whole Foods store. I wanted to find chicken and beef. In the meat department, I found two chicken choices - both raised in northern California.
It was a good thing I had talked to Whately about how to define local, because I was told there is no California-produced beef. I had my choice of beef raised in New Zealand or Nebraska. I felt comfortable choosing two filets mignon from Nebraska, supporting an American producer over a foreign one.
I continued browsing through the store. I found organic milk, butter, and cream from northern California.
A stroll down the peanut butter and jelly aisle yielded lots of organic choices, but none of them local. I moved on in search of other lunch choices. I found lots of California cheeses, and even discovered that one of my favorite lunch meats - a smoked, sliced turkey breast - is organically produced by a small family operation in northern California.
I was beginning to feel like a food detective, peering at labels and jotting down website addresses for further research.
All of the "local" foods I bought and ate that week were wonderful. I didn't manage to eat locally for every meal - there was one fast-food lunch and another at a local deli with a friend.
There was also a long-planned barbecue, hosted by a friend. But even then, I found a way to include local ingredients - I volunteered to make the salad. Chock-full of things I'd bought at the farmers' market, including the tomato-based vinaigrette, the salad won rave reviews.
Breakfasts were easy - eggs with orange-yellow yolks, fresh oranges and strawberries, organic apple-pomegranate juice, and toast with California butter. But they were accompanied by another of my compromises, homemade sweet marmalade given to me by a friend from Sicily.
Lunches were a variety of sandwich combinations, but most frequently turkey grilled with a California cheese and topped with avocado, onion- garlic sprouts, and the organic tomato-basil mayonnaise.
For snacks, I had raisins, dried figs, walnuts, and pistachios from the farmers' market.
For the sake of full disclosure, however, I must confess to one completely nonlocal, nonorganic indulgence: I drank a diet Cherry Coke whenever I wanted to. It's my favorite soft drink.
All in all, though, I felt I'd done pretty well for the week. It wasn't as easy as I'd expected when I'd been given the assignment. My food choices had taken a good deal of extra time and thought, but they were worth it - in terms of taste and in terms of feeling that I had some control over where my money was going and who it was benefiting.
It's going to be hard to think of grocery shopping any other way.
My chef friend Evan summed it up perfectly when she said, "I think eating locally starts as an abstract set of values which you want to conform to in your own life.... But then you get completely seduced by the tastes of what you're consuming. And you get drawn in shopping at the farmers' market. You wind up feeling unconscionably lazy if you make a different choice. Because what you're consuming when you eat locally is so much more vivid in flavor and in meaning."
