Green Tips & Tricks
“Better food—more local, more healthy, more sensible—is a powerful new topic of the American conversation…For the first time since our nation’s food was ubiquitously local, the point of origin now matters again to some consumers.”1 For a number of reasons this month is a good one to mark the beginning of a new year for local produce. Our winter harvests— roots, heavy greens and storage crops—are trailing off. March, whether frost or no, is when you can plant seeds for lettuces, spinach, and other veggies designed by Nature to withstand spring frosts. March 15 is when my community tomato king George lovingly nudges heirloom seeds into peat pots packed onto a cookie sheet, which sits atop his gas stove for pilot light warmth. He’ll put them out, then plant them as Nature signals. George’s are the first local outdoor tomatoes on my plate each summer.
to establish that a normal-ish American family could be content on the fruits of our local foodshed.” City Food, Water Travel Far She had loved living in Tucson, “one of the most idyllic destination cities in the U.S….By all accounts it’s a bountiful source of everything on the human-need checklist, save for just one thing—the stuff we put in our mouths every few hours to keep us alive. Like many other modern U.S. cities, it might as well be a space station where human sustenance is concerned. Virtually every unit of food consumed there moves into town in a refrigerated module from somewhere far away. Every ounce of the city’s drinking, washing, and goldfish-bowl-filling water is pumped from a nonrenewable source—a fossil aquifer that is dropping so fast, sometimes the ground crumbles….
Happy New Local Food Year By Karen Verna Carlson, N.D., Ph.D. (Hon.)
Spring Is Certain
Food Choices and Family Values
March is the vernal equinox. We are all aware even subtly of lengthening days and rising temperatures. Right now, some folks may be desperately hanging on by the thinnest emotional threads sustained only by the certainty of more sun and warmth growing week by week. (Remember 2004’s seemingly endless cold tortuous spring with a mid May frost? Arrgghh!) Vernal equinox 2013; ahhhh, that cosmic shift on the 21st into longer days that will warm and feed this year’s crops.
“We had come to the farmland to eat deliberately….We only knew, somewhat abstractly, we were going to spend a year integrating our food choices with our family values, which include both ‘love your neighbor’ and ‘try not to wreck every blooming thing on the planet while you’re here,’” writes Kingsolver.
Living on Local Food March is also Barbara Kingsolver’s Local Food New Year choice, too. “It seemed sensible to start [our 365-day experiment] with the growing season.” She had moved with her husband and teenage daughter to an Appalachian farm in Virginia. “We hoped
A Rare Moral Arena ”We hoped to prove—at least to ourselves—that a family living on or near green land need not depend for its life on industrial food….We hoped a year away from industrial food would taste so good, we might actually enjoy it….Doing the right thing in this case, is not about abstinence-only, throwing out bread, tightening your fake leather belt, or dragging around feeling righteous and gloomy. Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice — continued on next page
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www.livingwellmagazine.net
March 2013