First Full Week...

Doug's haul from Green City Market.

The first week of eating locally wasn’t a total bust, but I’m not beating my chest, either. It had it’s high points, and low points.

After receiving a low local score from Doug on one of the meals I prepared (Doug is enthusiastically applying a scoring system to rate the locality of our meals, a system I think we both now agree is best applied to our own efforts, instead of someone else's), I decided to send the hunter out to track down and bring home some local food.

The beginning of May is tough, especially the first year of eating local; nothing preserved, nothing fresh. The farmer’s markets in Brookfield and LaGrange hadn’t opened yet. The closest way I knew to get some good vittles was at the Green City Market at Peggy Notebart.

Doug make the very valid point that driving into Chicago wasn’t improving our carbon footprint, but unless we wanted nothing but meat and canned things from our pantry for the next week, this was our choice.

Following is a transcript of Doug’s texts to me while he was hunting and I was working.

Doug - “$%@* this!

Judi - What’s wrong?

Doug - No parking anywhere. They moved to an outdoor spot. City is having some event

Judi - Sucks. Like me and Sylvia at the outlet mall.

Doug - 45 minutes after getting to Peggy Notebart - finally in!

Judi - good job, my hunter of local food!

Doug (later) - We are about a hundred bucks poorer. But we can eat dinner tonight. But only tonight.

Judi - You are so funny

Doug - I wish I was joking.

I came home from work that afternoon expecting to see a measly haul, but I was amazed! Oats, black beans, squash, spinach, mushrooms, carrots, asparagus, cabbage, even nettles (?)! One meal my arse!

Still, as we approach the middle of our first month, there have been many times I’ve appreciated the stuff remaining in our pantry from our “pre-local” days. For example, there is literally no fruit to be had this time of year. If it wasn’t for the canned pineapple and dried mango and apricots I had leftover, my girls wouldn’t have any plant-based item in their school lunches at all this month. (not big into carrot sticks). However, that stuff is getting depleted. A lot less waste, a lot less trips to the supermarket, and a bit more creativity is the trend this month.