‘Food patriots’ find winter to be tough on local diet
QUINN DAVIS
Contributor
CYNTHIA CHELIUS & DALE MILLER COURTESY PHOTO
There’s no better way to top off a 60-degree November Saturday in Michigan than to indulge in some local tropical fruit.
That’s right: local tropical fruit.
While most Michiganders know the mitten’s weather too well to be shocked by its erratic behavior, many would be hard-pressed to name its native tropical fruit.
“It’s a pawpaw,” states Kim Bayer, chair of the leadership committee of Slow Food Huron Valley. “It tastes like a mix of banana, pineapple and mango. It’s really perfect for cream pies.”
Bayer first discovered the pawpaw in an attempt to fill her diet with local produce. Most people would say she is a locavore, typically described as a “food patriot” — someone whose diet consists of food grown or produced locally or within a certain radius such as 50, 100, or 150 miles. While Bayer guesses that this is true, she also feels the label is too reductionist.
“It characterizes someone as this wacko fringe,” she said. “It’s really about having a place in the community.”
Ann Arbor People’s Food Co-op board member Jeff Mc- Cabe is another local foods enthusiast that takes issue with the locavore label.
“As soon as something sounds like a club, I’m kind of the last person to want to be in it,” he says. “Whether or not locavore is the word, I don’t know. All I know is that I see this stuff and I want to make it happen.”
For many Ann Arbor citizens devoted to local foods, “this stuff” refers to the educational networks and food programs that keep the local food scene alive throughout the year.
“April is the most difficult month to be eating locally,” Bayer said. “It’s the end of winter and it’s right before the growing season starts.
“Being a locavore is really understanding what’s produced in your region and making it a priority to find it, cook it and eat
it. It’s a lot about talking to people and asking them. Come to the co-op and ask, ‘What do you have here from Michigan?’”
In addition to the People’s Food Co-op, both McCabe and Bayer work with local organizations that support locavores and the farms that feed them. McCabe is part of FridayMornings@SELMA, a local and seasonal breakfast that he and Lisa Gottlieb host out of their home.
“We’d been eating some of our diet local for a long time, but we didn’t have a formal structure,” McCabe said. “Now, every Friday morning we have anywhere from 80 to 100 people coming for breakfast. After doing something like that, you start to notice what you can and cannot get locally.”
Donations from FridayMornings@SELMA go toward purchasing hoop houses for local farms. A hoop house is a type of greenhouse that uses solar radiation to keep warm.
“They make a big difference as far as being able to eat local food in the winter,” McCabe said. The SELMA group has already funded and helped construct two hoop houses since the fundraiser started in February.
Bayer is a member of the Slow Food Huron Valley Leadership Team. SFHV fosters connections within the local food community and hosts events to support those connections while educating and welcoming new guests.
One such event was the SFHV Local Harvest Cook-Off held on a recent Sunday at the Chelsea Fairgrounds. Families and friends brought homemade dishes using as many local ingredients as possible. Chef Alex Young of Zingerman’s Roadhouse, Lenawee County culinary arts department head and Chef Corbett Day and Ann Arbor Cooks owner Natalie Marble judged the dishes.
CYNTHIA CHELIUS & DALE MILLER COURTESY PHOTO
Rena Basch, winner of the soup/stew category, went home with a blue ribbon and a Tantré Farm heirloom squash the size of a toddler. Basch fi rst became interested in local foods through her work in farmland preservation as Ann Arbor township clerk. Now she splits her time between her clerk position and her community-supported
agriculture program, or CSA, Locavorious.
Basch created Locavorious after being a member of a Gardenworks, another local CSA. She describes opening that fi rst box full of local food as an “aha” moment: “I don’t celebrate Christmas, but that’s what it felt like.”
Now Basch enjoys similar moments through Locavorious. She freezes locally grown fruits and vegetables during the harvest season and packages them for her customers during the winter months.
“When members come back the next month and say they were the best blueberries they’d ever had,” she said. “That’s when I know I’m doing something right.”
Actually, I don’t find eating locally in Michigan – especially Ann Arbor – all that difficult in winter. Local meat and dairy are available all year long. Michigan is a huge potato- adn bean-producing state, and even Pioneer and Penninsular Sugars could be considered “local.” Eden Organics canned goods like beans, tomatoes, and apple sauce are local. I bought a dozen small winter squashes at the market in October, and they’ll happily sit in the breezeway until next October if I don’t eat them first.
The hardest part is adjusting your tastes and expectations – you might have salad in January, but it won’t have tomatoes on it – but once you adjust to expecting a lot of “storage vegetables” and dry goods in the winter, you’re good to go.
Nice article Quinn! I am so excited to see the breadth of the interest in local foods in our community.
People are also starting to realize, in this time of financial difficulty, how much impact eating locally can have on our economy. In Washtenaw County alone, we spend over 1 billion dollars a year on food. Yet less than 1 percent of those purchases were grown in our county. If we would shift to growing 10 percent of our food in the county this would result in over 90 million dollars in new economic activity, even before all of the multiplier factors that would also result. Using models of successful new small farming, such as Eliot Coleman’s “Four Season Farm” in Harborside, Maine, this new food supply could be generated by 750 new small farms, employing 3000 workers, and yet would fit on a mere 5 percent of our present county farm land.
This is only one example of the downside of having created a farming system based on commodity crops such as corn and soy beans which currently average only about $380 dollars per acre yield (vs. $80,000 per acre at Four Season Farm) and only create about 3/1000ths of a job per acre when that number could be 3 jobs per acre. We may have come to view this labor efficiency as a benefit of industrial agriculture, yet it has become one more way that corporate profitability has trumped the health outcomes and livelihoods of the actual people it is supposed to support.
Eating locally-produced food does not have to be expensive or time consuming either. Even though some of this produce is fresh and organic and may cost a bit more than the stuff on the shelf at Walmart, turning off the television and the microwave at the same time frees up more than enough time to enjoy real food, prepared and enjoyed in the community of your family and friends.
Many people wonder how to take some first steps in supporting local agriculture. I would suggest:
• Shop at farmer’s markets – the Ann Arbor market is open Saturdays year round
• Ask your grocer “what’s local?” – a surprisingly low level of consumer interest has been know to have great impacts on grocery purchasing policy
• Join a CSA – the community supported agriculture trend is one of the few positives in farming trends, reversing the loss of farms and bringing down the average farmer age (jobs for young people!)
• Get your hands dirty! – there is nothing like food picked from your yard or balcony and trying to grow food your self to raise your awareness and appreciation of our area food experts
Eating locally has turned into an adventure for our family on any number of fronts. We have learned about growing food, cooking food, our local geography and economy and we have met a great number of interesting people in this burgeoning community. In addition we know what our food is, and that it is good for our health and the health of our region. Understanding the issues behind slogans such as “Know Your Farmer” and “Don’t Buy Food From Strangers” can pay off for you too.
I also want to be sure people understand that our weekly community breakfast FridayMornings@SELMA is open to all who want to learn more and take part in this movement. It is a great place to meet people, strike up a conversation and see and taste how delectable locally sourced food can be year round, even in our chilly northern climate.
Jeff McCabe