Upcoming Events

We will be at the Westside Community Farmers' Market this Saturday (9/8) from 9:00-10:00 serving coffee at the info booth. Stop by and tell us your local eating adventures or surprise us with one of your discoveries.

Plan to attend the ninth annual Food for Thought Festival. There is so much going on, please follow the link and see for yourself! We will be at booth #43 talking about our local eating adventure and we will be right next to the folks from the Wisconsin Eat Local Challenge. Come on down to hear great speakers, learn about what is available here and meet folks who are as interesting as you are!

Saturday, September 1: What is different?

We went to our two markets this morning as usual. The bright sun lit up the vegetables and we had several wonderful conversations with people who have been following our story. What was different about this Saturday? Well, I had already had a pot of coffee by the time we arrived at 7:30 am! We also stopped in at Cafe Soleil for croissants (oh how we've missed you!) Other than that is was business as usual. We bought a quart of chocolate milk today and some prepared pasta from Peter Pasta himself. We also bought cheese and yogurt and milk and apples and pork and bok choi and carrots and jicama and much more. The bounty continues . . .

Friday, August 31: Day 31

Wow! A whole month has gone by! In case you missed the Wisconsin State Journal article, we were also featured in the Isthmus this week. Check out this wonderful interview by Terese Allen.

This marks the official end of the experiment, but we all feel like we've only begun to learn about the food we eat. The question we've been asked (and have been asking ourselves) is. . .

What's next?

We will continue to update the blog—we'll aim for a minimum of twice weekly. In addition to any meaningful discoveries regarding what we're able to find locally, we'll keep our eyes open for references to the topic in the media—news stories or interesting new research. We'll also be sure to post on any events we hear about, hopefully in advance, but after the fact if that's the way it works out. And we will post producer profiles from farms we visit in the coming months.

In that spirit, here are a few upcoming events where we will be participating:
Food for Thought Festival, September 14 & 15. Look for our booth on MLK!
Westside Community Farmers' Market, September 8th at the info booth


Contribute!

From day one this has been a project about trying to spark interest in local eating in as many people as possible. With that in mind, we invite all readers to submit comments with experiences of their own—triumph or tragedy, success or failure. If you have something big to say, email us and maybe we can dedicate a whole post to it.


Was it worth it?

Heck yeah! It wasn't always fun, but it was fascinating, not only for what we learned about our food supply, but also what we learned about ourselves. The biggest thing, though, is what we learned about other people. The number of people who took an interest in this project was far greater than we anticipated, and most of them expressed some interest in local eating themselves. So we'd like to wind up the project with a challenge of sorts: if you have been reading this blog, take stock of where your food comes from and challenge yourself to find a little bit more of it from local sources. Going 100% local isn't for everyone, but you can always do just a little more. So give it a try, and let us know how it goes.

As Ming Tsai says, Peace and good eating.

Thursday, August 30—Day 30

Day 30? Can that be? Well, we knew that the month was nearing its end when we were presented with the following gifts:



Yep, we're right back where we started: coffee and chocolate. Many thanks to Laurie, who correctly discerned all of our preferences (dark roast for Jen, dark chocolate for Scott, and milk chocolate for Evie). We are starting to get questions from people about what we're going to eat on Saturday. Tune in and find out. . .

Our menu today:

Breakfast: Pancakes with butter and maple syrup, plus bacon and cider.

Lunch: The normal mid-day miscellany, a combo of Jen's tortilla creations featuring whatever vegetables she could find, plus salsa and cheese, hot dogs, and cut up fruits and veggies (finally finished that watermelon).

Dinner: Cheese pizza. We polished off the last of the 100 mile flour. Homemade tomato sauce with garlic (Harmony Valley Farm) and basil (grown in a bucket in our driveway). Topped with Farmer John's Provonello, which is a wonderful cheese that melts smoothly like mozzarella but has a little bit more assertive flavor. We've all agreed that we've fallen in love with his cheeses all over again.

I predict tomorrow will be an anticlimax--as a practical matter we will be ending the project early because there is a cookout to celebrate the end of Evie's logrolling class. As usual for a Friday, we'll all be in different places for lunch, which will be the last real meal of the experiment. We'll all try to have some deep thoughts for tomorrow.

—SCL

Wednesday, August 29: Day 29

Who is on your team?

Your doctor? Your accountant? Your lawyer? Your kids’ teachers? Maybe even your mechanic? Your team is those people who understand your needs and take them into account when they provide services to you. You trust your team to look out for you.

Are your food producers on your team? I think they should be. Food producers are the only people whose service you use every single day—the rest of your team you see when something goes wrong (sickness, audit, cracked radiator) or for preventative maintenance.

Throughout this project, we’ve campaigned for people to ask questions of their food suppliers. We've come to accept that we should ask questions of our doctors, to be active participants rather than passive consumers of health care. Are we willing to educate ourselves and become active participants in our food procurement system?

Fine, you say, but what questions do you ask?

It depends what you care about. I'll throw out what I see as some of the issues I have heard people express, just to stir the pot, and I'll also add some questions that have come up in discussions about this with consumers and with producers.

What are the issues? Everybody has their own, but here are some common ones:

1. Chemicals/Toxicity in food
2. Ecosystems and wildlife
3. Genetic diversity/heritage breeds/genetically modified organisms
4. Food miles (distance traveled) and other energy inputs (fertilizer, etc).
5. Small business versus agribusiness
6. Food safety and security
7. Humane treatment of animals
8. Human rights/treatment of workers/immigration

Without trying to create a list of questions specific to each point (because there are certain to be more that I have not thought of), here are some ideas for questions. And I should add that I recommend asking relatively open-ended questions both to avoid suggesting the answer you want to hear, and also to give the farmer the chance to demonstrate how much thought he/she has put into the process.

How do you choose what varieties to grow?

How do you promote soil fertility? (fertilizer, cover crops, rotation, etc).

What are your major pest/disease challenges and how do you deal with them?

Do you participate in any certification programs, such as Certified Organic or Integrated Pest Management?

If products contain other ingredients (such as sausages, jelly, or cheese, for example), what are they and where do they come from? Are any ingredients required by law to be in the product?

Who does the work of harvesting?

Where is your operation located?

Here are a few that are more specific to animals, and these are a bit less open-ended:

Are your animals able to move outdoors? Do they have access to shade and shelter in case of bad weather?

What type of bedding/nesting material do they have?

Are antibiotics or hormones routinely added to feed? If so, for what purpose?

What are the animals fed? Does the feed contain any animal by-products? Where does the feed come from?

How far must the animals travel for slaughter?

Kay Jensen of JenEhr Farm offered me the following recommendation: Write it down. There is bound to be more information than you can remember, and even if you can, you may not know what it all means. So go home and look it up.

On a busy market day, a farmer may be busy and have a hard time getting into specifics with you—please respect that. Maybe you can come at a different time next week, or perhaps you can email your questions (check web sites, many such questions are already answered there). But also realize that if you feel farmers are less than forthcoming with you or are being evasive, you can always find someone else who will shoot straight with you. I recommend finding team members who have sound reasons for doing what they do, and who don't mind telling you about it because they are proud of the work they do. And well they should be—they have chosen to use their work to nourish us, which is the greatest give we could ask of them. And to the farmers out there, my deepest apologies if you are bombarded by a zillion questions as a result of this!

What we ate:

Breakfast: "the usual", toast with butter (running out of peanut butter, yikes!), maple yogurt, cider.

Lunch: Jen had tortillas with Farmer John's cheese and homemade taco sauce and sauteed red onions. Evie and I had hot dogs. We shared watermelon and red pepper.

Dinner: We were invited over to enjoy a 100 mile meal at the home of friends: Summer vegetable ragout, sauteed Jordandal Farm pork, and yummy whole wheat rolls with Brantmeier Farm wheat flour. For dessert, homemade yogurt with Gentle Breeze honey.

Those of you who saw the newspaper article about our project will recall that we said that if we went to a birthday party we would have a piece of cake. Well, happy birthday, Maddie!

—SCL

Tuesday, August 28: Day 28

Lots of activity today. The biggest thing is probably that the Wisconsin State Journal ran a front page article about our experiment. They came to the house to chat about what we've learned and to take some pictures of us working in the kitchen. The article includes many of the resources that inspired or informed us, and we're hoping some more people will give this a try in whatever way makes sense for them.

Jen made tortillas this morning. In a very uncharacteristic move, she read the instructions carefully, and it was well worth it--by far the best tortillas we've made so far. I am officially fired as tortilla maker. Here she rinses the corn after it has soaked overnight in the lye bath to dissolve the seed coats and soften the kernels.

Later in the morning we went raspberry picking at Blue Skies Berry Farm. We learned from the owner that, "if you take care of your soil, your soil will take care of you." What she meant was that thanks to the many improvements they have made to the quality of their soil and their drainage, they were able to withstand 16 inches of rain in 2 weeks and lose nothing more than a few rows of beets and carrots.
We got a mix of orange and red berries. We're drying some, eating some fresh, and putting up some puree to fight off scurvy in the dark of winter.

In the afternoon, Jen and Evie, along with some neighborhood friends, stomped the grapes we gleaned from the neighborhood. Jen then made them into delicious grape jelly—for consumption after the experiment due to its refined sugar content.


Today's menu:

Breakfast: Toast and cider.

Lunch: Tortillas with cheese and a red chile sauce I threw together with tomato, jalapeno, onion, garlic, herbs, and vinegar.

Dinner: Gnocchi with italian sausuage and swiss chard. The gnocchi were a bit dense due to the fact that I have not found any starchy potatoes yet--mostly still seeing waxy boiling/roasting potatoes. And the whole wheat flour probably contributed, too. But we did have real-live sheep's milk ricotta to make them with. Dessert was (what else?) raspberries and whipped cream.

We made a great new friend while berry picking at Blue Skies:

Frogs are considered excellent indicators of toxicity in the environment because they absorb everything through their skins. This guy was perched way up near the top of the foliage in a shady spot—I can't imagine how he got all the way up those prickly canes without getting cut to ribbons. But I will take him to be a sign of good things happening at Blue Skies. We nestled into the rows along with so many honeybees and bumblebees that the buzzing was constant (and soothing). With happy wildlife, robust and resilient soil, and a plentiful and delicious crop, I'd say they are onto something.

—SCL

Monday, August 27: Day 27

Today the blueberries were finished drying so the poblano peppers went in. We boiled more corn for masa and are letting it soak overnight. I plucked the grapes off the stems in preparation for stomping tomorrow, sewed a jelly bag and made peanut butter. NOTE: The jelly will require non-100 mile sugar so it won't be eaten until after Sept. 1 but I am preparing some things for winter.

Breakfast was toasted baguette with peanut butter and cider. Lunch was a variation on my usual tortilla lunch. This time it was cheese curds, hot hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, jalapenos and onions. We were invited to dinner at the home of friends, they were excited to try cooking a local meal. We had wonderful chicken from Ken Ruegsegger courtesy of the Paoli Local Foods shop. We also had potatoes, corn and bread with yummy chevre cheese. We had local wine from Weggy Winery and watermelon for dessert. We also had whole milk and black raspberry smoothie from Blue Marble Micro Dairy . It was a wonderful evening and we so appreciate those who have invited us over and taken the time to think about food and buy it locally.