100 Mile Diet Day 1 | Spending Binge

Breakfast was horrible: under-cooked hominy with a little homemade yogurt from my friend, Gretchen. I sweetened the yogurt with sugar (which I decided would be one of my ten allowed trade items). The hominy had been cooked with a little salt -- another trade item.

Hungry, I went to the Detroit Lakes Farmer's Market where I spent $31.25 on produce. Then, we went to an Amish farm where I spent an additional $6. For $37.25, I ended up with six big bags of locally-grown vegetables and two watermelons. Although the items felt expensive when I was forking over the cash, in perspective I realized I would be thrilled to get this amount of stuff for under $40 at Whole Foods. This loot, combined with hominy and wild rice from Native Harvest, will serve as my primary sustenance this week.

Countdown to 100 Mile Diet

Starting tomorrow (with breakfast) and for the next seven days, I have to limit my diet to foods grown, processed, and packaged within 100 miles of my apartment. Why? It's as assignment -- our whole class is doing it. And we're keeping a daily online diary of our local food experience, which I'm hoping will allow for some tips and consolation.

The philosophy behind the 100-mile diet is explained in a book and on the website, http://100milediet.org

The diet is supposedly inspired by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, who spent all of 2005 eating nothing but local foods.

I'm partially excited about the challenge, and partially anxious about having enough to eat. We're going shopping at the Detroit Lakes Farmer's Market tomorrow to stock up on locally-grown food, but part of our assignment is to scavenge for other local food sources by talking to neighbors, farmers, or surfing localdirt.com. It's not supposed to be as easy as one-stop shopping... It will take creativity, research, and initiative to scrounge up tasty local meals for an entire week.

The 7 days culminate with a pot-luck celebration, composed entirely of local foods (and local ingredients).

Tonight, I'm having a beer and making cookies... which tomorrow have to go in the freezer.

Welding and Wilderness

I started the day touring a conventional beef feeding lot, with the intention of identifying forage in the pastures that go unused by the fenced in cattle. It was raining, and our whole class got soaked wading in knee-high grasses while seeking out the elusive species of which we need samples.

This afternoon, I learned how to tie several knots, such as the reef knot, the clover hitch, and the sheet bend. Then, I got a quick lesson on welding and proceeded to weld rebar onto a metal rod that we were transforming into a coat hook. The professor offered to let me take the coat-rack to my apartment, since I welded much of it, but I declined -- so it will hang in our classroom.

After I got over my initial fear, it felt empowering to weld. I considered for about a minute looking for welding jobs in Fergus to finance my education.

I left class today with a jar of homemade yogurt and a crate of pears, which I assumed were grown locally and found out later came from Washington.

First Days in Fergus

I've been in Fergus Falls for 2 weeks now. Actually, I should say I've had my apartment for two weeks. I've probably spent just as much time in Minneapolis as I have in Fergus Falls lately.

I just completed my fifth day of class, and I'm amazed at how much I've learned. Today I drove a 4-stroke John Deer mower with a trailer attached; I practiced driving up and down hills, and "parking" the trailer by driving in reverse. This morning, I collected samples of several forage plants, including Kentucky bluegrass, alfalfa, timothy, sweet clover, smooth bromegrass, birdsfoot trefoil, and pea vetch. This afternoon, I learned about electric fencing and started designed an organizational system for a 12 foot trailer to hold the fencing supplies for the Sustainable Food Production program.

It was an odd feeling, passing by classrooms filled with students hunched over open textbooks while half-listening to the professor's Power Point presentation, while wearing rubber boots and carrying a bouquet of plants to press. Or walking by football practice to the back field where our class was sorting tools and fencing equipment, getting sunburned and eaten by mosquitoes.

This is not the kind of "school" I'm used to. It's so hands-on -- so practical. I feel like an idiot most of the time because I don't know the basics about farming or carpentry or mechanics, whereas most of my classmates do.

My book-learning has come in handy, though. Yesterday, when a grass-based beef farmer quizzed us about the source of all food, I provided the answer he was looking for: photosynthesis, the process by which plants turn sunlight into sugars.

Food Options

I recently read Joel Salatin's book "Holy Cows and Hogs in Heaven," which promotes buying food direct from farmers you know and trust as a means of improving your own health as well as the health of local economies, communities, and ecosystems. Joel maintains that the single best thing you can do to save the earth is eat food purchased from local, ethical, trustworthy, sustainable farmers. I believe there is a lot of truth to that.

When I moved to Fergus Falls, my first priority was to stock my kitchen. I went shopping for produce at four vendors: the local supermarket; the local independent health-food store; a farm stand on the side of the road; and Wal-Mart. I visited these vendors all on the same day; the juxtaposition of the experiences during each purchase was enlightening. I felt very differently with each one.

By far the most satisfying was purchasing "the perfect tomato" from the Bluebird Gardens stand from a kind, thoughtful woman who admitted she had been coveting this particular tomato all morning. She had picked it herself, and thought it was the epitome of tomatoes. She said I would have to enjoy it right away -- that very day -- because it was just at the right ripeness. So I bought that tomato, feeling somewhat guilty for taking the produce she had been coveting all morning, and I felt very proud to take it home and eat it that evening.

At the health food store, I bought locally-grown swiss chard. It was beautiful, green, and large... and I felt good about buying local and supporting the independent store. I refrained from buying the peaches there -- despite their tremendous appearance and flavor -- because I felt they were "too expensive" at 90 cents per peach. But I do realize that, compared to the cost of growing my own peaches, 90 cents per peach is a steal! Nevertheless, I passed them up and headed to Wal-Mart.

When I walked in to Wal-Mart (which is brand-new in town) and saw the expansive, colorful produce section, I was impressed. When I looked at the prices, my initial reaction was "I'm in heaven!" I had never seen produce for so little money!! A container of strawberries for under $2? Unbelievable! Of course, most of it was conventionally-grown far away from Fergus Falls... and I realized the farmers were getting short-changed (to say the least) with what must be an insulting compensation for the "fruits" of their labor. Yet I was hungry and wanted good food (by which I mean produce), so I stocked up and ended up spending by far the most money at Wal-Mart. I got a large quantity of produce at bargin prices, and that made me feel like a savvy consumer. But my satisfaction was tainted with guilt, knowing I was supporting an industrial food system that was depleting the land, polluting our environment, and cheating farmers out of a decent way of living (by which I mean earning a good income from growing produce sustainably, without exposing themselves to noxious chemicals, and selling it directly to people who value the farmer and appreciate their products).

The supermarket was the least satisfying shopping experience. The prices weren't that great; the produce didn't have a story; and I felt no pleasure from supporting a chain store.

I am going to try to get most of my produce from Bluebird Gardens... but I hate to admit Wal-Mart is a tempting back-up. Who knew buying produce could be such an aggravating moral and economic dilemma?

Perfectionism & Farming Don't Mix

Today in class, one professor commented on how there is no perfect farm. No one can farm perfectly. It is simply too complex, involving a large amount of variables which are constantly in flux. You can never know everything; you can never control everything; you can never perfectly optimize your land by creating the maximum, ideal, unblemished yield of every marketable item the land could produce. In this way, farming is like an art. The farmer is always striving to make things better, aware that inevitably there still always will be areas that could use more improvement.

As a recovering perfectionist, this caught my attention. To maintain their sanity, farmers have to "radically accept" that there are always variables out of their control. Things will go wrong: there will be drought or flooding, chickens will get picked off by predators, or a plague of grasshoppers will eat all the forage. Ultimately, you are just a steward of the land trying to do the best you can at the moment.

First Day

Today was my first day of classes in the Sustainable Food Production program at M State. It was intense. I definitely felt like a city girl! We learned how to estimate the dry matter yield (i.e. grass/food) in pounds per acre, to figure out how many days a certain number of cattle could graze on a given paddock. This involved created a tool to measure the height of the grass; taking the height measurements in several sample areas of a field; averaging the grass height from the sample areas; and plugging the average grass height into a formula (DMY = 432 * average height) to estimate how many tons of grass were on a certain acre. Then, we visited a real farm -- with real cows, chickens, and oh, yes, GRASS -- and we figured out how much time 40 cattle could graze on the paddock next to their current pasture. We calculated that there was about a ton and a half of grass on the next paddock, so the cows could graze their for about a day before they needed to move on to another pasture.

In sum, I learned how to estimate the length of time a certain number of cows can graze in a given pasture (before they eat all the grass). This guess-work involves a lot of variables and a lot of assumptions; it's very complicated and by no means precise. Lesson learned: farming involves a lot of careful estimation on a number of complex variables that yield useful information, but with a healthy margin of error.