Friday, July 25, 2008

The Experiment Begins

The Experiment: To only eat foods grown, manufactured, and produced within a 100 mile radius of our home in Burtonsville, MD for at least 1 year.


Why: I love fresh, seasonal food and a culinary challenge. My husband is an environmentalist who worries constantly about global warming. We can't afford to buy a Prius, but this is one way we can reduce our carbon footprint.

After we decided to go whole hog with this idea, we started to research on how feasible this will be and what kind of sacrifices we will have to make. We bought the book, Plenty: Eating Local on the 100 Mile Diet, by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon, we found out where all of the local farms and farmers' markets are, and we downloaded the USDA manual on preserving and pickling (http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/publications/publications_usda.html).

Sure, there are a lot of things that we can't have, but I'm sure we'll manage. We can't have sugar, but we'll use honey. We can't have OJ, but we can have all of the Apple Cider we want.

No Coffee and no chocolate-that might prove to be a serious problem.

We modeled our rules after those we found in the book, Plenty.

  • All of the food we eat at home must be grown/made locally, and organic whenever possible.
  • All of the ingredients in the food we buy must be local
  • We can eat out at restaurants occasionally, and at friends' houses
  • We can use all of the non-local food we currently have in the house
  • We can use spices and tea (I absolutely refuse to give up tea)
So, we're off!

1 comment:

Brenna said...

So admirable! I'm impressed with your dedication...especially with having a new baby in the house. At least twice a week, I pull something out of the freezer and shove it in the oven. Lasagne is not even close to locally grown. Anyways...you've inspired me to try to be a little better about fruits and veggies!!!