One Local Year: Surprises

We had some real surprises during the 100-mile diet year (Nov 2007 through Oct 2008).

The first is that eating high-quality home-cooked local food really ruined our taste buds for fast food, junk food, and cheap restaurants. Ugggh! I used to eat That? This used to taste good, now it upsets my stomach. Home-cooked foods are made from ingredients, in other words, real foods. No fillers, no artificial colors or flavors, no hidden MSG; no high-fructose corn sweeteners, no transfats, no preservatives, no modified food starch. We also tried to buy organic as much as possible, which has better flavor and nutritional value.

The second surprise is that I lost interest in buying standard grocery-store produce, so pretty looking, so tasteless. The Western Slope fruits are so far superior to the fruits shipped in from California or Washington state. I'm sure fruits bought ripe locally IN California or Washington for local consumption are perfectly fine. It's the whole industrial food system, picking chemicalized and water-bloated produce way ahead of ripeness, shipping it across the country, then "ripening" it with chemicals. Have you wondered how you have U.S. apples year round? Or consider the long path for produce from China, Argentina, New Zealand? How far before ripening must they have been picked?

Now I am a bit of an enthusiast for Western Slope fruits, actually, since I think the best Colorado pear or peach, apple or nectarine, is better than the best California peach, or the best Washington apple, but my comparison is unfair, since I've never eaten a tree-ripe California peach.

The next surprise was how much I did not know about harvest times in Colorado. I realized that fresh produce would be pretty much unavailable in March and April, but it was still unavailable in May, and only in June did a significant harvest of fresh vegetables show up in the farmers' markets. We had the early season vegetables: peas, beans, spinach, early lettuce. Then everything took the month of July off, pretty much. The lettuce and spinach bolted, the peas burned up, and it was slim pickings until August. August through October is the cornucopia time in Colorado. We were up to our ears in a wide variety of vegetables and fruits. Inventorying my stocks, I was a very busy person during those three months, canning, drying, and freezing the produce. (I dated all the containers--always a good idea with home-preserved foods.)

The fourth surprise was that home fruit trees and home gardens, especially with season extenders, can provide a great many items that are practically unavailable commercially in the area. Commercial Colorado fruit is from the Western Slope (and wonderful stuff it is), but our yards are full of apples, pie cherries, plums, peaches, and even pears; also raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, elderberries, Nanking cherries, serviceberries, and chokecherries. Anyone with a small garden in Colorado can grow strawberries, but they are commercially unavailable from this state. If you have a yard, plant some fruit trees and shrubs, some strawberries.

I've grown celery at home, muskmelon and watermelon, and garlic. You can even grow okra and small sweet potatoes here. Some of the CSAs in the area grow melons very successfully, which are distributed to members and sold at farmers' markets. You never see Northern Colorado melons in the stores.

What's more, with a hoop house, small greenhouse, or even coldframes, you can keep hardy greens and carrots living and ready for harvest all winter long. Our winters are not as harsh as they were 50 years ago, so the rules of thumb we learned as children, or from older gardeners, are no longer entirely valid. Our plant hardiness zone has moved from 4 bordering on 5, to 5 bordering on 6. This makes season extenders even more practical. Eliot Coleman's book "Four Season Harvest" is a useful resource. Anyway, the upshot is that if you keep your own garden, you can extend that three months of Colorado bounty to at least nine months, and you can get a lot of fruits from your yard or your neighborhood.

Another surprise was that I lost weight slowly and effortlessly, just by not eating junk. And my diet was not that bad to start with. I did not go hungry, and did not feel deprived. Real foods, cooked at home, are just more satisfying. I wouldn't mind losing some more weight, and perhaps that will happen over the coming year. My husband has been on a moderately low-carb diet for the last six months, which we were able to work out with the local foods, and has lost a lot of weight.

A surprise for me was the things I did not miss. I have not had citrus fruits except for a small amount of lemon juice in a year, or a banana or mango or other tropical fruit, and I really don't miss them. I don't miss sweet potatoes. Tapioca, especially tapioca flour, was a little harder to give up, since it's very useful in gluten-free baking. I didn't miss out-of-season foods like strawberries in January, apples in March, asparagus in winter. I'm willing to wait for them to be in season.

It was interesting learning the things that we really didn't want to do without. When I planned the 100-mile diet, I planned in ten exceptions, five to be chosen by each of us. My first was salt. No way I'm doing without salt. The next three were beverages: coffee, black/green tea, and herbal teas. The herbal teas can mostly be grown here, with a little advance planning (maybe next year!). I was not prepared to cook without olives and olive oil, but I was able to find them from California. I made an exception for the tropical spices that really are impossible to find in a temperate climate: pepper, cinnamon, etc.

Our only seafood has been Alaskan wild-caught salmon, and very little of that. My sons each said, "Mom, you could get a fishing license..." and I could have, and added Colorado trout to my diet, but I didn't do it. For years I have been gradually reducing the seafood content of our diet, due to concerns about overfishing and environmental effects of farmed seafood. So it was not too much of a stretch to just stop everything except the sustainably harvested salmon.

It didn't take DH long to put raw nuts on his list, which we restricted to U.S.-grown. Walnuts, almonds, pecans, hazelnuts, and pistachios are on the list.

Finally, we used two vegetable exceptions to make it through the winter limitations: California canned tomato products, and U.S.-grown peas, frozen, fresh or dried. When the crops came in, we dropped them.

Now, looking back on the year, there were a few other things we missed. Basically they fall into the category of "condiments"--mustard (DH Loves Mustard), vinegar, lemon juice, coconut milk, herbs and spices, all in small amounts (except for mustard). Also, I had lots of herbs and spices on hand, but when they're gone, I'll either grow or buy some more. Maybe some day I'll figure out how to make local mustard, but for now, mustard in a jar is the way to go.

In the next post, I will talk about the future: the second year of local eating. We will be continuing local eating; it's pretty hard to conceive of NOT doing so, but we will allow a few more little niceties in our diet.