Finding local food can be cruciferous, get help with
the NRDC local food finder
May 21st, 2009
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
We all need to start eating closer to home, and with all due respect, I
don’t mean down at the corner KFC.
I’m talking about finding fresh, locally grown produce for home cooking. Do
we even need to list the reasons? Buying local food cuts down on polluting
“food miles”, bypasses refrigeration trucks, supports local farmers and puts
nutrient-rich foods on our plates.
But unless you grow a lot of your own food, how can you distinguish what
came from your friendly local farmer in Illinois (or Texas or California)
from what came from a rain forest-encroaching big-Ag operation 2,000 miles
away?
Increasingly, grocery stores are helping us get smarter about food. They are
labeling produce as local, organic and “conventionally grown”. Recently, I
found myself bathed in info at a large Whole Foods Market. There I gaped
before a mouth-watering, six-foot-high tower of neatly sorted cruciferous
and root vegetables, squash and herbs stacked and organized according to the
Dewey Decimal system. There were many signs. Some of the food was local,
some was organic, and some, but only some, was local and organic. And
because experts say that choosing organic is important, and also that
choosing local is vital, I thought my head might explode.
That same week, I found myself at a farmer’s market being handed green beans
that were supposed to be local. But it didn’t seem quite possible that they
actually could be…unless they’d been planted very early…in a greenhouse.
Maybe they meant loco?
It’s not always so easy, greenies. So how do you nail down what’s local?
Obviously, you can grow some of your own — it’s guaranteed local. You can
join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) network. You could lurk at your
farmer’s market and eavesdrop on people who appear knowledgeable and
drug-free. And you can learn the seasons. It needs to be in season to be
local, and if it’s local it is certainly in season. See a tautology! This
will only trip you up when someone ships apples from Washington to sell in
New York, which harvests apples at the same time. Because of our complex
food system, this sort of thing happens regularly. At least you can compare
apples to apples.
If you want to skip the Farmer’s Almanac portion of this learning process,
go straight to this great resource: The Natural Resource Defense Council’s
Local Food database. There you can type in your state and the month and pop
up a list of produce that a shopper could reasonably expect to see harvested
somewhere in that state at that time.
In Illinois, by late May, for instance, you could expect to find:
Asparagus,Cabbage,Cherries, Greens, Leeks, Lettuce, Onions, Peas, Radishes,
Rhubarb, Spinach, Sprouts, Squash, Strawberries.
But in Texas, in late May, look for a fruitier selection: Blackberries,
Blueberries, Cabbage, Cantaloupes, Carrots, Cucumber, Grapefruit, Herbs,
Honeydew Melon, Lettuce, Mushrooms, Nectarines, Onions, Oranges, Peaches,
Pears, Peppers, Potatoes, Summer squash, Sweet Potatoes, Tomatoes, Turnips,
Watermelon
And so on. Happy May.
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