It seems clear that an early step to sustainability is to cut down the number of miles our food travels to get to us, but it’s hard to give up some of the little pleasures that come from far away.
I eat a little sesame snap made with sugar, not the ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup that likely contains GMO corn. Being in the “eat local” challenge I finally looked for where they are manufactured. No, not the Middle East — they come from Poland! I’ve only eaten one package all week.
I missed them yesterday on my trip to Crater Lake. I packed a lunch with all the same cheeses I’ve been eating all week and brought Lundberg rice cakes instead of my imported rice crisp. To eat a rice cake you have to hold it properly, with the right amount of tension or the darn thing will explode when you bite it. Even with my years of experience I left a scattering of rice puffs for the mountain jays to feast on. I also had some snap-pea crisps (Southern California, a bit out of my local comfort zone) and home-grown sungold tomatoes. For dessert I had another peach.
On the way back we had to drive through wood smoke from the Sky Lakes fire. The fire camp is at Lost Creek Lake, where the RVs are circled like Conestoga wagons. I usually don’t want an early rainy season, but that seems pretty selfish.
Dinner was a bean stew I made with black-eyed peas purchased from Bigham Farms. I hated those beans when I was a kid in the South. They make ‘em up pretty plain there. I combined them with tomatoes, a splash of wine (Oak Knoll pinot noir from the Willamette), a slice of Farmer Bickert’s Canadian bacon, salt, pepper and rosemary. OMG, very good. I didn’t like having to shell the beans. Still, that was before I ate them, so I could get over that inconvenience.
All in all, I’ve gotten a lot better at eating local over the last week. Just one more weekend to go and I’ve got company coming.
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