I just finished listening to one of my favorite books, a truly inspiring book called “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver.
It’s about the author’s project of living an entire year from food grown or raised themselves or from local sources. They raised chickens and turkeys for eggs and meat and grew, well, just about everything. She made her own cheese and pizza dough from items purchased at farmers markets or her neighboring farms. She even canned and froze her produce so they could survive on the fruits of their labor throughout winter.
It’s inspiring to say the least. She really did her part to reduce her carbon footprint and eat sustainably. She supported local farmers and encouraged others to do their part as well.
However you have to keep in mind that the author did this project knowing full well she was expected to write a book from her experience. So she was a little more than motivated to make it work. In fact, that was her JOB for the year. It’s like an actor saying it’s easy to stay in shape- of course if it’s your JOB!
For the rest of us that live in areas that can’t grow everything we need all year round and work and have tons of other obligations, it’s a little more difficult.
But it did inspire me to look at my habits and make some changes for a better world.
I’ve already started Meatless Mondays, which as I understand, can help save about a million barrels of oil a year or something like that. Which is insane. But Meatless Monday doesn’t guarantee that my food is not traveling a great distance to feed me. Are there other ways Chris and I can inspire folks to eat local, sustainable, and green?
Enter my new challenge idea-
Washington Wednesdays and Farm Fresh Fridays.
Washington Wednesday will be the day out of the week where everything we eat comes from Washington. So as local as we can get. I like the idea of finding new and exciting entrees right in our own backyard, so this seems like it’ll be almost enjoyable. Salmon is almost a given, but I look forward to exploring my vegetable options too and even some special treats (Theo’s chocolate anyone?). The true challenge will lie in ensuring not only in eating clean and local, but healthy as well (did I say Theo’s, I meant Growing Washington CSA).
Farm Fresh Friday- well I don’t think we’ll have an issue with healthy or clean eating but the true challenge is to ensure its FRESH, so again, locally sourced. I feel this will take a bit of detective work to ensure our meat is as sustainable, organic, and local but I’m definitely up for this challenge as well!
I need to do some more preparing, which is fine bc even Ms. Kingsolver took three or four months before starting her project. I hope to be ready to start in late March or early April. Only question is, who’s with me?
