Daily Archives: July 24, 2005

Riscy and I have decided to accept the Eat Local challenge. It is mid winter here, so I think we will need to be fairly creative this August 🙂

My definition of local is Gippsland and the Greater Melbourne area.

My personal committment to this challenge is that I will try to source everything from a local producer, if I can’t establish if an item is local, I will either go without or buy the item from small, local family owned businesses.

Ok, being realistic here: Our goal is to eat greater than 80% local foods. There are some things which aren’t grown locally like Tea and Coffee and perhaps some things I will have to assume is local, like milk.

Why am I doing this? I hate that animals are battery farmed. Until recently, we had a little double standard going, we’d buy free range eggs, but ignored the source of our chicken meat. Then I was startled to find out that even the red meat we buy from the supermarket is most probably battery grown. It makes my stomach heave just thinking about it.

How did I become so dissassociated from my food that I would ignore my own participation in something I am totally opposed to. It is just plain laziness. This August I commmit to THINKING about the source of my food and ACTING on this committment by eating local.

Our farmers market is only once a month, so on Monday morning I will contact the market coordinator so I can find growers in my area.

Mary from Knitting Notes posted some lovely buttons for this challenge and also mentioned a book which I totally enjoyed called Prodigal Summer by Barbera Kingsolver. One of the characters has really stuck with me as she refused to plant the monocrop of her area (tobacco) and made her own way as a primary producer (goats). This story tapped into my old university escape fantasy of becoming a goat farmer and cheese producer. LOL not lottery win dreams for me back then! Continue reading →