Year of the Locavore

Hello and merry December, y’all!

You may have noticed that the last entry was in first-person, following a host of third-person entries described as ‘CSF,’ in general. The farm has been a group effort, to be sure, with a posse of urban farmers tearing around on our steeds (bikes) and tearing up the sod, but the ‘I’ behind the last entry is me, Erica Lemieux, the facilitator behind the foliage of CSF.

A coordinator of cultivation. A sower of seeds, a SPINner of spinach.

And I have an announcement!

I am conducting a 30-day experiment. Starting DECEMBER 1^st (aka yesterday), I will ingest only local food for one month.

This mad undertaking is for the purpose of obtaining a better understanding of where our city’s food comes from, and thus more effectively doing my part to increase our urban food shed.

Some of you may be thinking, Didn’t you do this last year, Erica?

Yes, yes I did.

Why aren’t you just a permanent locavore, then?

It’s not easy! How could I live without grapefruit?! Coffee?! Chocolate?! Shark fin soup ?! (just kidding) But I have learned a lot this year, and am once again approaching this wild world of FOOD with a concerned curiosity that I just can’t shake.

My culinary boundary will be Ontario’s borders, for sake of practicality. I have noticed that food is not necessarily labeled from the farm at which it is grown, but from where is processed or packaged or distributed, making it nearly impossible to make a set limit of kilometres. (Or is it? I’m going to experiment with googlemaps… more on that later)

It is not going to be pretty, this experiment.

Or necessarily healthy,

Or with the smallest energy budget or carbon footprint,

Or the tastiest.

No, in fact, it will be none of these things. It is Ontario in December, not at all a realistic time or place with which to confine sustenance. On top of this, I’m a gal from the city, so my acquaintance with our surrounding rural stock is fragmented at best.

These days, we have huge knowledge gaps between what we eat and where it came from. Where did it come from?! I ask, in regards to a nugget of cereal resting in my hand. How could one possibly know, from the information we are given on the label. Knowledge gaps so large and encompassing and embedded, that I didn’t even know that I didn’t know, you know?

It’s kind of like those little cartoon fish in the ocean. Those two little fish and the one older fish. The older one, swimming past, says to the two younger ones, ‘how’s the water, guys?’

Puzzled and contemplative, the little fish swim on. Finally, one says to the other: “What’s water?”

That’s what I want to find out. What the HELL water is.

Except, you know, human-stylez.

It is almost 2010, The Year of the Locavore, and what better way to ring in the new year than with some local chicken thigh, VQA red wine, and some all-Ontario borscht. This is going to be a bizarre and, at times, unpleasant experiment. Some may even say foolish, or pointless. But I say, hey, the proof of pudding is in the eating.

Local pudding?