Fri 31 Aug 2007
Wow, This Local Challenge Thing Might Be HARD
Posted by Liza under Mmm yummy
Last night, I rushed to the grocery store right after dinner, for breakfasts, drinks, and snacks for our weekend retreat. I made two stops, the warehouse-grocery-meets-farmers-market, which I think I’ll be shorthanding to Produce Warehouse during this experiment, and a regular mainstream grocery store, the cheaper of my neighborhood chains.
Produce Warehouse:
- Bananas, organic, from Mexico. Imported directly, which I guess means something to some shoppers, but I’m not sure what. There were big signs with a map and everything. Along with
50,00030,000 pounds of bananas*. - Apples, gala, conventional, from Washington State
- Musileli type cereal, organic, from Canada!
- Purple Muscadine grapes, bought since they were the only fruit from Georgia that I could find. I hope Noah likes them.
- Multigrain bread, organic, baked on-site. Yummy, and I have no idea where the ingredients came from. Jeez this could get hardcore very quickly!
Cheap Grocery:
- Tropicana Fruit Squeeze water-juice bottles. These are my newest addiction. They’re fruit juice sweetened, low-calorie, and delicious. Lakeland Florida, which can’t really be justified as local, but at least is a state boardering mine.
- Pretzels - I went with the brand from Pennsylvania instead of Texas. Not local, probably a wash as far as distance goes.
- Yo Baby Yogurt - Organic. From New Hampshire. A staple of Noah’s diet. I’m thinking about the suggestion that I make yogurt myself, but I’m not committed to it yet.
- Pepperidge Farm cookies - Fairfield, CT. Not local. I should have bought cookies at Produce Warehouse, but I forgot.
- 4 Pack of Starbux Frappucinos - The label says “North America.” I’m going to guess non-local. I’m a coffee junkie and we have no idea what the 5:30 am coffee options are going to look like at the retreat locale.
* A random bonus prize will be awarded to the first person correctly identifying that reference in the comments below. No googling!
August 31st, 2007 at 7:02 pm
oh, the dangers of so many thousand lbs of bananas… you can lose your head over them!
August 31st, 2007 at 10:23 pm
Wow. Good luck and good you. I try to do this, and our big chain grocery stocks local farmers’ produce this time of the year, but for much of the year there’d be little we could eat. What would I do without rice? You might have an easier time in the South with a longer growing season.
Affordability is also an issue. The local stuff at our co-op is often much pricier and strangely doesn’t look so fresh. I do go for the local cage-free eggs though.
August 31st, 2007 at 10:25 pm
WAY OFF TRACK HERE….
I clicked on the disney ad that was on the left, and it opened an entire site in the little sidebar, the site appears to be a blogher error page, saying the page I tried to find isn’t on their server anymore…
Just FYI.
August 31st, 2007 at 10:26 pm
still me sorry…
I clicked again after I posted and it takes you to the disney site, but its still in your sidebar.
September 1st, 2007 at 12:59 am
Liza, regarding the ad Rachael wrote about… it opened into a new window for me. I’m using IE 7.something (and yes, I know your views about IE, but I don’t like Firefox!).
September 1st, 2007 at 4:50 am
Hrm, well thanks for letting me know about the ad thing. I’ll drop the BlogHerAds folks a note.
Carrie, you’re right about the price issue. Interestingly, though, JD at GetRichSlowly did an elaborate grocery/fancy grocery/produce stand comparison experiment and found that if you can conveniently get to actual farmer’s produce stands, the quality is better and the prices is cheaper. http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/08/21/grocery-store-vs-farmers-market-which-has-the-cheapest-produce/
I’m not sure I would take on something like this “forever” but there’s very little I can’t live with for a month.
For me, the real point is to raise my own conciousness about the issue, and look for things that I can sustainably do, that I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
Trista, I think you’re the winner. But drop me an email with an extree detail or two, to make sure?
September 1st, 2007 at 9:22 am
My parents used to make yogurt when I was a baby. They said it was really easy– until I started eating the yogurt faster then they could make it. So they caved and bought. I don’t really remember this, just the stories. Moral being, my sister might remember and have an idea– that said, she might not.