The Ins and Outs of an Ordinary Life

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Local Food Challenge

I belong to an organic food co-op. I get a basket of food every 2 weeks. The co-op buys the food from farms near (blueberries from New Jersey and far (bananas from Ecuador) and distributes it to the various "pods." I'm not sure how many pods there are in the co-op, but each pod has 15 members. Each pod is responsible for dividing the food into 15 shares. In our pod, members volunteer to do this job (you save $15 if you pack). Anyway, you cannot pick and choose what you want, you have to take whatever the co-op buys that week. I don't usually buy much other produce. It takes me about 2 weeks to use all the food. I am facing this local food challenge without the opportunity to shop at a local farmer's market. So, I have decided that in addition to the local food I get in my co-op order, I am going to concentrate on using up food that I have in the house-- can't get much more local than that. Time to cook all the chicken breasts in the freezer and add salsa to the tofu scramble and make salads with barley or wheatberries. I am going to cook and pack lunches for DH and I. Eating out will be more of a special treat.

The most recent co-op order did include blueberries from NJ and kale, lettuce, mushrooms, and yellow squash from Pennsylvania. Those are my local foods. Been working on the lettuce with salads, and last night I made some wonderful blueberry pancakes for dinner!

This morning I rode with "Ladies of C." There's a group of us that are 40+ years old, and we are all slow C riders. We rode 35 miles this morning and it went down pretty easy. It felt good!

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