100 Mile Diet | Day 3

For brunch today, I had some Swiss chard quiche and some homemade pumpkin pie. The pumpkin came from Bluebird gardens. I cooked half of the pumpkin in boiling water on the stove-top; the other half I roasted in the oven. Boiling the pumpkin was by far faster, and I don't think there was any difference in the taste. My only regret on the pie was that I should have added more seasonings; I used twice as much pumpkin pie mix as called for in the recipe, but I should have quadrupled the amount. The quiche was good, too -- a little runny, but like the pie, it was made without a recipe by someone who doesn't have much experience in the kitchen.

For an early dinner, I had beef stew made with tomatoes, onions, garlic and carrots from Bluebird gardens; hominy from Native Harvest; and green beans from the Detroit Lakes Farmer's Market (more specifically, I got them from "Feel Good Farm"). It was pretty tasty. I also had some sweet squash, mashed with Cass Clay butter and local maple syrup; that wasn't as good. Maybe I'll try to make another pie and incorporate the leftovers into the filling.

Pumpkin pie again for dessert, and I'll be very satisfied. I've gotten used to cooking, and so today the diet doesn't seem so hard.

100-Mile Diet | Much Better with Practice

Day 3 of the 100-Mile diet, and I'm kind-of getting used to it. I've been cooking up a storm; in the past 24 hours, I've made: a pumpkin pie from scratch, a Swiss chard and onion quiche; mashed squash with maple syrup; a baked potato; and beef stew with hominy, tomatoes, carrots and green beans. I've also prepared an egg bake that is "sitting" in the fridge until it's ready to be cooked; it has Swiss chard, shiitake mushrooms, onions, and Bongard's marble jack cheese.

My egg bake also has Dakota bread from the Falls Baking Company, although that item was a bit of a stretch. The flour in the bread comes from Northern Minnesota, but they guessed their source was about 150 miles away. I felt like that was close-enough -- it was Minnesota flour, and the bread was baked 1/2 block from my house by a locally-owned bakery -- so I called it good and bought it to use in the egg bake.

For the pumpkin pie, I had to use pumpkin spice mix and baking mix (for the crust) -- two more trade items. The quiche also had a crust made from the baking mix.

The beef stew, however, is entirely local. It's pretty good, too -- despite having been made without a recipe by someone who can't really cook.

100-Mile Diet | Critical Caffeine

Oh caffeine, I now realize how wonderful you are!

Today I added a new trade item: Diet Pepsi. I wasn't going to do it, but I was so tired from not eating anything substantial, and I was being so indecisive about what to cook and how, that I capitulated to my craving for diet soda. And truly, it helped -- a lot.

I felt like I just couldn't do this 100-Mile diet without some caffeine, and since I had some cold cans of diet Pepsi in my fridge tempting me, I gave in. I opened a can. And it feels so good to have that back in the "allowed" category! Maybe now I can deal with eating only local food -- as long as I can have that one non-local beverage.

100-Mile Diet | Stress over "Special"

Since I've worked hard to procure all these local ingredients (or, harder than I usually do in buying food), I am finding I appreciate and value each item more.

Today I asked my boyfriend for advice on how to use my pound of local ground beef, and as we were discussing options, he said "don't waste good beef" on an untested recipe. The ground beef had become precious -- the opposite of a fungible commodity.

I feel like it's my duty to make the most of all my local ingredients, which is creating a lot of stress. I've been researching recipes that use only the local ingredients, and I have to be careful what I use when, since there are no more farmer's markets before the end of my diet-week. I can't just go to the grocery store and get more ingredients -- the grocery store hardly has anything that was locally grown. So unless I want to live on Bongard's cheese later this week, I need to ration my produce and use every item wisely.

The local foods are "special" -- not easily obtained, and often more expensive and harder to prepare than alternatives (consider canned pumpkin vs. a whole pumpkin purchased from a local pumpkin patch). Combined with the fact that I can't really cook, this is causing me a lot of stress about how to put it all together.

100-Mile Diet | Sources and Sacrifices

The Cass Clay dairy products I bought said they were from cows not treated with hormones (this was in the fine print), but nothing was mentioned about how the cows lived out their daily existence. I doubt they are on sustainable farms, grazing on diverse forage in a green pasture. They probably live inside, in a high-tech barn on an industrial dairy farm.

After visiting several sustainable farms in the Fergus Falls area, I have become extra sensitive to the origin of my food. I wonder, where is the farm? What does it look like? Are the cows outside year-round, or are they contained in pens filled with their feces?

I felt bad buying Cass Clay dairy products not knowing more about their source-farms. Eating locally should, ideally, bring me closer to the source of my food. But until I identify local farms from whom I can purchase products directly, in some ways I remain as disconnected as I was before.

I am happiest with my purchases from the vegetable farms that I toured in person, where I spent several hours talking with the farmer about his methods and philosophy. I loved cooking "Dallas' kale," which I didn't wash because I know he washes everything three times. I also like having two bunches of Swiss chard to compare: one from Ryan at Lida Farm, and one from Dallas' farm, Forest Glen. I think of the produce as "Ryan's" or "Dallas'," rather than as "just Swiss chard."

Tonight, I cooked Ryan's Swiss chard, mixed with Dallas' kale, in garlic from Mark Boen's farm -- possibly picked by my classmate, Andy, and sold to me by Mark's wife, Diane.

As I was eating my bowl of greens, I couldn't separate the food from the knowledge of where it was grown. Each ingredient (except the olive oil, my trade item) felt personal -- it had an emotional and intellectual significance.

That's what eating local should feel like.

Grocery Stores and Local Food

It is really difficult to discern, when visiting a conventional grocery store, the origin of the food for sale. Some items are marked "United States," or "Canada," but that's about it. It gives the impression that an apple is an apple, a steak is a steak, a carrot is a carrot -- where or how it was produced doesn't matter much. It made me wonder: do people genuinely not care, or has agribusiness and advertising made them believe it doesn't matter where food comes from?

I went to the two "regular" grocery stores in Fergus Falls -- SunMart and Service Foods -- in search of locally grown and produced edibles. In particular, I was on the look-out for local dairy products: Bongard's and Cass-Clay. Before coming to Fergus Falls, I had never heard of either; but to be fair, I haven't been a huge consumer of dairy products for nearly 20 years.

I have decided to abandon, temporarily, my gluten-free, dairy-free diet so that I can appreciate more fully the experience of "local eating." Hesitantly, I purchased Cass-Clay milk, half & half, and butter, along with a brick of Bongard's marble-jack cheese. Cass-Clay was one of the main brands of dairy products displayed at Service Foods; Service Foods was also where I found Bongard's cheese (SunMart does not carry it).

Browsing the very limited selection of food produced by local brands (Cass Clay, Bongard's, Barrel o' Fun), I couldn't help but dwell on what I was sacrificing to stick to the 100-mile diet. I was craving corn chips, but Barrel o' Fun didn't have "non-GMO" or "organic" on the label, so I passed them up. I stuck with the dairy products I usually avoid, daydreaming about making a pumpkin pie from scratch.

I don't know the recipe for pumpkin pie -- or rather I didn't have one with me in the store -- so I searched for canned pumpkin hoping there would be a recipe on the label. No such luck -- neither grocery store had canned pumpkin!

I asked an elderly woman next to me in the dairy case if pumpkin pie called for half & half or heavy cream, and she suggested "gourmet" half & half from Land o' Lakes, which she grabbed off the shelf for me. I politely took it, waited until she was gone, and then exchanged it for Cass Clay half & half.

When I got home, I looked up "pumpkin pie" in the Joy of Cooking, and it calls for heavy cream. Not wanting to go back to the store and buy even more dairy products, I've decided to figure out a way to make pumpkin pie with Cass Clay half & half.

100 Mile Diet | Day 2

This local-diet is turning out to be harder and more time-consuming that I thought. I spent the entire day today shopping for local foods, looking through cookbooks, researching recipes online, and preparing ingredients for nebulous dishes.

This morning I enjoyed a much better breakfast than yesterday: fried eggs and fried eggplant. Tonight, I cooked a huge bowl of kale and Swiss chard; so far, that's been my entire dinner. No protein, except for many some worms eaten by accident; as I was eating, I found a couple dead, fried worms in my bowl of cooked greens.

I am cooking hominy on the stove, boiling pumpkin pieces, and roasting half a pumpkin and a sweet potato squash in the oven. I am not really following a recipe and I don't know how long to cook any of these things... I'm planning to judge by intuition.