Recently, Ruchi posed some interesting questions about sustainable living, blogging over time, and finding balance. Her posts are sparking lots of thought-provoking comments and discussion. One of the bloggers mentioned that it can be hard to live sustainably if you get "all hard core psycho about it." This and several of the other comments on the two posts really resonated with me.
As I've considered the 98% Local challenge I posed for myself in this coming week, I have come to realize that, once again, I am going overboard. I have a tendency to do this, as regular readers know from past challenges, and it is always a difficult decision whether to stick with it to salvage my pride or back off to salvage my sanity. This tendency to bite off more than I can chew is nothing new. Way back in high school, I really put myself in a bind during my senior year.
One of my courses was Biology Independent Study. I had to come up with and carry out a research project, supervised by my teacher. Since there were regular fires in the nearby mountains, we decided it would be interesting to compare the recovery from fires several years apart in the same canyon. Initially the plan was to compare the plant life in small plots within each area. Pretty soon, though, I got carried away and proposed including far more: insects, reptiles, small mammals, and birds. My instructor, unfortunately, was thrilled. I soon realized that I was looking at way more work than was realistic for this kind of project; it would have been helpful if the instructor had reined in my enthusiasm.
As each day progressed, my anxiety level rose. My ego was unwilling to admit my error, though, and I kept plugging away despite the growing panic that I would be unable to complete any portion of the study because I was overwhelmed. How did I get myself out of this dilemma? Well, I lucked out. Due to some other circumstances, it proved best for me to drop out of school, take the GED exam to get a high school equivalency diploma, and head off to college a semester early. Whew, got myself out of that jam!
So, how does that relate to now? After a lot of anxiety and thought, I've decided I'm really not ready to jump into the deep end of 98% local eating. I'm not sure what percentage of my meals are currently comprised of local food but it's probably between 50 and 75%. To go from that level to 21 meals in a row that must be 98% local is getting all hard core psycho about it, especially when I'll also be dealing with jury duty this week.
Yesterday, I'd convinced myself not to even bother trying this experiment. I wrote and deleted three versions of a post to that affect. Today, I've decided I will proceed but with changes to my rules for the challenge. Instead of only allowing myself salt and spices from non-local sources, I will approach it from the other direction. The main components of my meals will be derived from local foods. Minor components will be local, if possible, but still allowable if not.
This will open the doors to a more reasonable approach, for me, to eating locally. For example, instead of having to eat my locally grown wheat berries whole or cracked, I can use the ground flour to make bread products. Tortillas need baking powder, bread needs dry yeast (because I don't currently have a sourdough starter), and muffins need baking powder, salt, and my flax seed egg substitute. None of those are available from local sources.
With this change, I am no longer dreading the next week. I think this is a more balanced approach in my attempts to increase the amount of my food that is locally grown. I plan to share my meals here throughout the week and will note what is local and what is not.
For those of you who strive to eat a local diet, I'd welcome hearing about how you choose what to include and exclude. How much local is good enough? What foods do you still eat that are not available locally? What non-local ingredients (such as baking soda) do you still buy?
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Hi Chile,
ReplyDeleteFrom my pov things that traditionally would have been shipped into an area and cost an arm and a leg accordingly I am actually happy to use. The thing is that I am aware these things should only be a small percentage of my diet as the transport costs in the future will be prohibitive.
For my area this frees up things like spices, yeast (although I use sourdough for most things), baking soda, baking powder as well as the condiments and sauces I don't yet have home made replacements for. Chocolate also falls into this list but is considered an extreme luxury item and only bought accordingly.
Kind Regards
Belinda
This really goes to the heart of the sustainability of living sustainability. It has to be something you can do everyday without driving yourself crazy. It's very much like a diet. You can go crazy for a few months and lose tons of weight. If you end up depriving yourself of things that are important to your body and soul, you won't maintain that weight loss. In the same way, we can't beat ourselves up over the slips that will happen living in this very unsustainable society.
ReplyDeletei think balance is key and I agree- the comments and discussion that have been happening lately have been interesting and insightful.
ReplyDeletei also believe that challenges often (in my experience) end in no sustainable changes to lifestyle, but stress and anxiety- like you said. For myself, the best way to change behaviour, is to do so gradually.
And as long as we aren't stagnating in our changes, then progress and sustainability will be achieved. It's not a competition, we're just trying to find our way....
Belinda - thanks for your input! I need to try to move more things into the luxury category to minimize their use. With chocolate, we have been splurging because I scored 9 containers of organic fair-trade cocoa powder a couple of years ago marked down to $1 each (a phenomenally low price). Now that we are down to the last tin, it is encouraging us to treat it as a rare commodity again.
ReplyDeleteThe Mom - you hit on another key issue: those of us trying to live more responsibly are living in a culture that does not encourage or support such behavior. In fact, our behavior is often ridiculed. Talk about makin' a person crazy...
Eco Yogini - the challenges I've participated in and hosted have, more often than not, led to permanent changes in how I do things. It's very easy for me to get into a comfortable groove - a rut - and I sometimes need an extra push to move along the path. Challenging myself is often really good at doing that.
However, pushing too hard to change can result in backlash and failure. So, I have to work hard to find that sweet spot of just enough challenge to get out of the rut but not so much to overwhelm me.
I still use baking soda, coffee, baking powder, flour (although I have found some rather local flour that I am enamored with, coffee, sometimes citrus fruit, bananas, coffee, pepper and some spices, salt and lentils, beans, nut i st least buy those items in bulk. So that helps cut down on delivery. And lets see: canned goods although not as much as I use to.And coffee.I don't think there is a local source for coffee, although the coffee I buy is locally roasted. So no folgers here. I plan on growing my own tea this year. so maybe that will cut down on my coffee intake. But doubtful.
ReplyDeleteI've recently become a fan of the FlyLady website which focuses mainly on housekeeping routines, but the philosophy behind it all applies to many areas of life. Her philosophy might be summarized as:
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, don't aim for perfection -- setting the bar too high can be overwhelming and undermine the best of intentions. Secondly, make progress in small, baby steps -- one good habit at a time. And thirdly, learn to love the process. Don't think of work as drudgery but as blessing your home and life. I think her advice works well whether we are talking about cleaning toilets or eating more locally!
What's funny is that I'm all about "eat local, eat local", but when you posed this challenge I cringed - especially in light of my recent discovery that our diet isn't as local as I thought it was ;). If you'd posed the challenge in the fall, though, during our growing season when the Farmer's Market was bursting with good stuff, I'd have been all over it. Right now, though, the pickins are pretty slim and the thought of having potatoes and mealy apples three meals a day for a week ... not so appealing. My family might go on strike ;).
ReplyDeleteThat said, if you'd let me modify it to one meal per day 98% local (and for me that means "grown in Maine") for the week, I'd join you.
What do you say? Are we on?
Rob - it's interesting to see what people in other parts of the country get from other places. I'm torn on whether to consider coffee from northern Mexico "local". It's regionally local, certainly closer than Hawaii or Costa Rica...
ReplyDeleteI suppose an alternative, if we're willing to forgo the caffeine, would be homemade grain coffee. So far, I can only get oats and wheat here; I think barley is preferable.
Gaias Daughter - I'm familiar with FlyLady but hadn't thought of applying her principles that way. Thought-provoking!
Wendy - yeah, I know. It's not fair that I've got such beautiful variety available here while ya'll up in the frozen north are anxiously awaiting the chance to grow again.
Since I decided not to do this as a challenge for other people to sign up for, you are welcome to adapt the idea any way you like. I think one meal per day is a great goal for Maine in winter. :)
More and more I have come to appreciate the 'middle way.' I'm glad you modified your challenge instead of giving it up entirely. I try to follow the "bullseye" diet (sticking to local as much as possible, but allowing in progressively fewer non-local items the further away they originate), although here in the northern winter it gets harder to do. I find that in order to keep my motivation at a reasonable level, I have to cut myself some slack sometimes. If I don't do that, then I seem to fall into a funk, like I did last year. I'm trying to be more balanced about things this year, so I don't crash and burn by September again.
ReplyDeleteSo: make challenges challenging but reasonable. I like this solution.
ReplyDeleteNo joking, I'm glad to hear this–I was feeling overwhelmed just reading the terms of your week, and how am I supposed to be motivated to challenge myself likewise if what you do scares me? It's not very inspiring to do such things. ;)
Theresa - finding that middle path is so hard, though...
ReplyDeleteStephanie - sorry I overwhelmed and scared you. I'm trying to be less psycho, if that helps. ;-)
With the type of job that I have, my world is much smaller. I buy local as frequently as possible, and preserve food from my garden and the local farmers market.
ReplyDeleteHowever, my bigger priority is cooking from scratch for nutritious and economical meals. I do as much local as possible, but I also realize that not everything I use is local. I do try to not buy outside the U.S. or or out of season.
dogear6 - since there don't seem to be a lot of prepared local foods available, cooking from scratch is practically a requirement for local eating.
ReplyDeleteHm, I should qualify that since there are vendors at the farmer's markets that do sell preserved vegetables and jams and jellies. However, since I do that stuff already, I never buy their stuff. :)
Hi again Chile;
ReplyDeleteThe middle path is indeed difficult, which always seems ironic to me, since it is in the middle afterall. Anyway, I came across an interesting article via Twitter today I thought might be relevant and seems quite middle-way-ish. It's by Toby Hemenway the permaculture guy:
http://www.patternliteracy.com/selfreliancemyth.html
One of the reasons the whole local food thing has stuck around our house is first we live in California which has crazy availability year round but also because I enjoy it all so much - the sourcing, the farms, the farmers' markets, the stories, the people. It's entertainment, health, art, grace, land preservation, story, community, board game and good for the environment all rolled into one happy meal. And I still buy baking soda and milk at the grocery store. Enjoy yourself and progress will follow.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if this will help make you feel any better or is way off the mark, but I just wanted to mention that very, very few civilisations have eaten as localvores.
ReplyDeleteThe Romans used to import spices from across the globe, and while they used sumac for vitamin c, that fell out of favour once citrus was imported and was completely replaced by citrus. Europeans imported vanilla, chocolate and spices from all over the globe too, among other things. Columbus never would've even "discovered" the Americas had he not been looking for a quicker way to obtain spices and other foods from a non-local setting. In pioneer times, people heavily relied on transportation to get things like salaterus, coffee, tea, spices, and loads of other foods.
That doesn't mean that I don't think it's an admirable goal to try to eat as locally as possible, but maybe you will feel less bad about not going 98% when you bear in mind that for centuries, people have been getting their food from all over the place. Even though we do it in a less environmentally sound way than we did centuries ago, I'm thinking that limiting the imports somewhat is a step in the right direction but that completely eliminating imported food is not something humans will really ever go for (and I'm not even convinced we should strive to completely eliminate it, since it has drastic economic implications for people far less fortunate than us).
Rob, I just wanted to throw this in really quickly: in terms of getting non-local caffeine beverages that reduce delivery costs, I just thought I'd mention that coffee gets an average of 40 cups per pound, whereas tea gets an avrage of 200 (first infusion) cups per pound. I don't know if that helps you in any way, but I thought I'd mention it since you said you were considering swapping out coffee for tea, and tea might be more sustainable in terms of transportation costs.
ReplyDeleteI try as much as possible to eat foods that CAN grow in my region. Potatoes and barley, not rice, for example. But I'm not going to fuss because the potatoes I'm eating came from the neighbouring province.
ReplyDeleteI eat foods that I know have always been traded long distances - coffee, cocoa, sugar, molasses, spices - but I try to buy them the way people used to, in large quantities that are stored at home. If it's something that I know my grandmother used on her rural farm, I'm happy to buy it. But, like her, I'll try to keep enough of a supply on hand so that I can weather shortages.
There are no local options for milk because of the way milk is sold in our province.
I go "hard core psycho" on enough things. :)