Know your Foodshed! Eat Locally, Think Globally!

The book "Coming Home to Eat" by Gary Paul Nabhan is a sensual almanac of Nabhan's year-long culinary adventure of eating food grown, fished, or gathered within 200 miles of his home, near Phoenix. The book, which is available at BookPeople, is "a vibrant portrait of our essential human relation to the foods that truly nourish us, affirming our bonds to family, community, landscape and season."

Between descriptions of roasted mescal and the pleasures of gardening, pit roasting, fermenting, feasting and frolicking, he examines the politics behind American food and agriculture, as well as his personal spiritual quest to truly belong to a place.

"In our molecules and in our dreams, we really are what we eat. Eating close to home is not just a matter of convenience - it is an act of deeply sensual, cultural, and environmental significance."

This is a wonderful book about the process of learning to eat closer to home and the seasonality of food. Paul Nabhan's experiment leads him to numerous adventures, and eventually to organize a very spiritual walk home from the sea with local tribes, a celebration of native foods, culture and place.

The book focuses on the reflection of a bioregion or landscape in lifestyle, culture and cuisine.

"Until we stop craving to be somewhere else and someone else other than animals whose very cells are constituted from the place on earth we love the most, then there is little reason to care about the fate of native foods, family farms, or healthy landscapes and communities."

When we choose to eat locally produced foods, we support community health. Local foods don't generate as much waste and pollution as processed foods transported a long distance. By eating local, we are protecting wildlife habitat, clean water and the workers who are also our neighbors.

There are many people working to encourage local food production and consumption in our area. Offering local foods is part of the mission of the Moscow Food Co-op. The Palouse-Clearwater Environmental Institute offers garden plots and educational classes about organic gardening at the Moscow Community Garden. Rural Roots, a local non-profit, is working to connect small growers with local consumers. There is a Community Supported Agriculture farm in Clarkston that will deliver fresh produce to your home weekly during the growing months. Others are working towards a growers' network of people who garden, and would like to share or exchange different vegetables, flowers or other produce.

In the next few weeks, watch for new "locally produced" signs to appear around the Co-op. Perhaps if there is enough interest, we can put together a local foods dinner in the spring at the 1912 building. And happily, the farmer's market will begin again in May.

If you are interested in learning more about native foods, call the Nez Perce National Historic Park at Spalding and ask about Longhouse dinners. Responsible wild harvesting and hunting is another great way to be a part of the local food chain.

And to summarize, here's some interesting food facts from "Coming Home to Eat":

• The average American brings home nearly 3,300 pounds of food each year for his or her own consumption (of course, much of this is never eaten). This is nearly 2 1/2 times the weight of what most of our contemporaries in other regions of the world consume, and much of it comes from their farmlands.
• Most Americans get 90% of their food from non-local sources, with shippers, processors, packagers, retailers, and advertisers gaining three times more income from each dollar of food purchased than are farmers, fishermen, and ranchers.
• In 1910 farmers received 40¢ per $1 spent on food, but by 1982, they only received 7¢ per dollar, the "middle men" of agriculture were gaining the rest, without ever investing it back into land stewardship.
• In the last 50 years we have lost one out of every five acres of farmland.

Robin Jenkinson is a local botanist who enjoys supplementing her meals with edible wild plants.

 

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