Loca-Vore Challenge

Himanee Gupta-Carlson

In a moment of possible craziness, I signed up for a new monthly challenge. The challenge is the New England Association of Organic Farmers-New York's annual Loca-Vore Challenge, which takes place in the month of September. The goal is "to inspire awareness and action in eating locally and organically," according to the association's web site at https://www.nofany.org/events/locavore-challenge and the challenge includes a range of possible action-steps that one might take.

I first heard about this challenge two years ago when it was in mid-process. I learned of it again last year but was uninterested because it emphasized things like eating at restaurants that get their products from local sources or hosting or attending community dinners. These actions cost money, which I didn't have much of, and the list of actions that one could do for free didn't really seem to include much of anything I wasn't already doing. So I poo-poohed the idea as another yuppie-inspired creation and more or less forgot about it.

This year, I stumbled on the challenge while searching for information about a course that I had heard Adirondack Community College was offering on sustainable farming. I looked a little more closely at the different kinds of things that one could do to participate in the challenge and decided to give it a try.

The same caveats about spending money by eating at restaurants or going to community harvest dinners still apply. If anything, I will have even less disposable income this year than I did in the previous year, and frankly, I don't think making one's self a true "loca-vore" is about spending money.

The idea behind being a loca-vore is to try and obtain as much of your food from locally produced sources as possible. The rather shifty term "organic" gets embedded from time to time into this localism; however, the real goal is to get your milk from the local dairy and your meat from the farmer in the next county, rather than someone on the West Coast (when you're living on the East Coast). The goal, as I understand it, also is to sidestep the national retailers and corporately produced foods.

My husband Jim and I grow about 90 percent of the vegetables we eat, and buy the rest from local farmers. We also buy all of our meat from local farmers, with the exception of an occasional purchase of prosciutto from Roma's, an Italian and Mediterranean deli. We also raise hens, which means we produce our own eggs. We get our milk from a local dairy. However, we do buy cheddar cheese, butter, flour, yeast, oil, soda, beer, nuts, seltzer water, chocolate, granola bars, juices, and fruits such as bananas from the grocery, and because of our rather tight pocketbooks, don't always buy the best-est most organic versions of such products.

So what might this challenge do to help me eat even more locally?

Here is a list of action steps I committed to trying. I will note that this list includes only steps I have not already taken such as committing to buying produce from local farmers.

* Building a makeshift root cellar for storage crops. This is a project that my husband and I have been discussing for a couple of years, so perhaps the challenge will give us the kick in the butt to actually make it happen.

* Using local honey and maple syrup in place of sugar. I've got stevia growing in my garden this year, so I'm adding that natural sweetener to my list.

* Making your own local organic butter, yogurt, or ice cream. I have given up on trying to make ice cream, but I will commit to not buying butter or yogurt -- and making it myself.

* Making your own bread with local organic grain. I have a feeling that I might be priced out of this action step, but I will look into it, at least.

* Doing a community assessment to identify the strengths and obstacles in your local food systems. This project particularly intrigues me.

* Reading books on the NOFA-NY recommended list.

* Sharing the experience via a blog.

I should emphasize that there are a variety of other action steps listed on the NOFA-NY website that also do not entail spending inordinate amounts of money such as experimenting with canning or freezing fresh produce, composting kitchen scraps, or getting involved with grassroots political efforts to promote more availability of locally produced foods. I wanted to choose steps for myself that would challenge me to look at what I was eating and how I was obtaining it a few steps further, so these were the steps I decided to take. I will share the experiences as appropriate via my Moving Your Body and Sustainability blogs. Stay tuned!