A Locavore's Dillemma: I'm #@%!ing poor, and I can't look at another potato.

I felt the need to blog about something that has had my attention for the past few years:

Local food.

Ta-da!

Eating a meal where I know that the food was grown close by, harvested by me or a face that I know, is one of the most satisfying experiences I've ever had. It sounds simple, but it's true. You can taste how local it is. It tastes better, it's healthier, and it's carbon footprint is minimal, if not nothing. Seriously. Just eat a carrot grown in your grandmother's backyard as compared with one from Safeway. You'll know what I mean.

And for the average North American, our food travels between 1,500 and 3000 miles from farm to plate. And that doesn't include the distance of packaging. Or the distance travelled by the oil that was used to fuel the production of pesticides, which is on the majority of our produce nowadays. Yikes.

So, I want to eat local. First step is admitting you have a problem. Wait, a problem? Yup. I find it amazing that we live in a society in which eating entirely local is very, very challenging. I am in the midst of reading "The 100-Mile Diet", a non-fiction narritive that relates the tale of a couple from Vancouver who set the goal of eating food grown within a radius of 100 miles from their apartment for an entire year. I'm not very far into the book, but so far they have faced arguments, financial issues, winter scarcity, and cravings for non-local products.

So, why is eating local so difficult?

First of all, for a Canadian, so many of our considered 'regular staples' are not local. Don't get me wrong, there are lots of things that grow here. But there are so many things that we eat daily that are simply not local. For a locavore in Vancouver, bread is not an option. Olive oil. Spices. Almost every grain you can think of is not grown near Vancouver. Then there are the obvious ones that discourage so many people from eating local: Coffee. Tea. Sugar. Avocadoes. Mangos. Oranges. Lemons. The list goes on.

Secondly, the ever-so-evil yet ever-so-precious dollar. Unless you are growing all your own food, you rely on farmers' markets for local food. It's true. It isn't cheap. Even though sometimes all it takes is good budgeting--of sacrificing a few things for the sake of having local veggies at the table--it totally sucks that buying a banana from Ecuador costs under a dollar, and an apple from a local orchard can often cost over 2.

But the biggest one, I have found, is the lack of knowlegde. As someone who wants to eat local, I have realized that I must obtain a huge amount of knowledge that wasn't passed down to me when I was growing up. I have to learn how to garden. How to grow different things at different times. As well, in order to not starve during the winter, it is essential to preserve and store food that grows in abundance during spring and summer. Unless you want to live on a diet of root vegetables for four months (or more). How to can, store food in cold, and ferment. There is a huge wealth of knowledge out there, and it is very difficult to obtain this knowlegde on your own. I feel lucky to live in a house where several of my roommates already have this knowledge. But doing this all alone can feel daunting.

But in my mind, this is all knowledge that needs to be learned. I feel not only the interest, but the obligation to learn all this. Our modern global food system, that we all depend on, is one of the leading causes of climate change and peak oil. This may be surprising, but with a little bit of thought it makes total sense. Everything from how the lettuce was grown, processed, packaged and shipped uses immense amounts of fossil fuels, and that once seemingly endless resource is rapidly becoming scarce.

The day of peak oil is looming. What is peak oil? Basically, it is the day when the amount of oil we have in the world begins to run out. Not when it completely runs out, but when we cannot produce (or extract?) any more. Eating locally is one of the most important things we can do in the face of peak oil so that we can be self-sufficient again.

Let's face it. We're utterly screwed if we don't start learning right now. So I've decided. I'm going to try and learn as much as possible about gardening, storing, canning, preserving, fermenting... so one day I can live entirely out of my own backyard.

It means one day sacrificing my daily cup of English Breakfast, but that's the price I'll have to pay.