Week I: The Transition

River Valley Farm in Lenox, MA lies just off bustling Route 7 in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. Turn east past the strip malls and parking lots lining the two-lane highway, and within a mile you've left the neat green lawns of familiar suburbia and entered rich, lush farmland, each farmhouse a little further from the next. We're in Lenox to watch Garrison Keillor record "Prairie Home Companion" at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. But we're also in prime Berkshire farm country and into our first couple of days of eating local. River Valley Farm can offer us a variety of meats and is on our way from the campground to Tanglewood. When we pull into the farm's driveway, Lisa Petricca, the farm's owner and manager, is there to greet us.

Lisa has been farming in the Berkshires for the last ten years, and the pork, lamb and chicken we buy from her are a result of her last six years of animal farming in Lenox. She and her husband had started with an organic vegetable farm, trying the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) route, but was unable to find CSA customers in her area. More popular to the north and south in Berkshire county, CSA's have yet to take off around her ("which is okay, because they will," she says, confidently). She joined Berkshire Grown, a community network that connects growers directly to buyers, and that's when her business took off. "The chefs wanted to know what I was growing," she says, " and I wanted to know what they were buying. We made gentleman's agreements - if I could successfully grow something, I knew they would buy it."

From veggies to animals
After Lisa's daughter raised a sheep for a 4-H project, the family got hooked. "All of a sudden sheep just started coming to us. People brought them to us who had started them for 4-H and didn't want to keep them, or people who were done raising sheep and wanted them to go to a good home." Eventually her daughter bought a pure-bred ewe, and then they discovered California Red Sheep, River Valley Farm's signature breed. Known for its delicate flavor and tender meat, as well as for their unique, silky wool, these sheep also do well on a grass-fed diet, something Lisa is committed to. "Grass is what sheep naturally eat, so we selectively breed for animals that can put on weight on an all-grass diet." Over the summer, as the sheep give birth, the herd grows to about one hundred animals. River Valley Farm also raises goats (pictured above, a baby goat), which graze on the plants that the sheep won't eat, and has two "guard llamas, who watch over the sheep," says Lisa. Alpaca and feeder pigs round out the farm.

Lisa says that it is now easy to sell to restaurants, that chefs have begun to catch on to the advantages of local food. "Chefs want the highest quality product they can find, and nothing is higher quality than something that was picked that morning. Something that has been shipped from California and is two days old, even if it is organic, just can't compete."

Though the farm is organic (not certified) and, even more impressively, certified biodynamic (a European method of farming that views the farm as a single ecosystem, rather than disparate systems), she says that people are much more interested in having a relationship with their food producer and thus, their food. "People love that they can drive up to our farm at any time and see a sheep. We tell them how we practice our farming, about the organic and biodynamic processes, and while people are happy about that, it's really just a bonus for them. What they enjoy is having a relationship with the person who produces their food."

***

River Valley Farm is the first farm we visit on this little experiment. Week I is nearly completed, and already I've been to three farmer's markets, one farm, and yes, even to Whole Foods Market. In a pinch, we've found that they - surprisingly - carry local eggs, butter, a yogurt and a few cheeses in our 150-mile radius, including an absolutely spectacular mozzarella from Vermont. So for last-minute dairy needs, we can always run down the street.

But that, of course, is not the point of this exercise. I've learned quickly that planning ahead and cooking are going to be the main two tasks associated with eating locally. Boston is lucky enough to be graced with numerous farmer's markets, so what I can't get one day is bound to be found at the next day's market (so long as it's in season). But going to a farmer's market every other day is a little time consuming, so I've resolved to be better about planning my menus and paying attention to what needs to be eaten in the fridge.

Having to cook every meal is a little mind-bending as well and already I'm trying to think of short-cuts around this common eat local complaint (to avoid locavore burnout). I've settled on yogurt and fruit as my favorite breakfast, but I'm very ready for lunch once noon rolls around. Since we don't yet have bread, sandwiches are out. This week it has been leftover chicken soup and chocolate milk; I'll have to figure out something else that will keep for a week so I don't have to cook twice a day.

We have had some amazing dinners though. River Rock Farm is destined to be our local purveyor of beef (free home delivery!); we grilled some delicious steak tips from them a few days ago. Accompanying the meat were new potatoes from Parker Farm, that Whole foods mozzarella along with some absolutely gorgeous, juicy tomatoes (no olive oil needed) for a caprese salad, and swiss chard braised with Mendon Creamery Butter (a butterworks in the Charles River watershed!).

Thinking outside the vegetable box
This week's CSA farm share (we belong to Parker Farm, in Lunenburg, MA) and a trip to the Central Square Farmer's Market introduced me to two new vegetables. The first, familiar only by name, is escarole. Mistaking it for a salad green, Alaine and I were initially put off by its incredibly bitter flavor and tough stem. But after conferring with Farmer Steve, I dropped half the batch in a pot of chicken soup (made with a River Valley Farm soup chicken), and half an hour later, the green had lost all its bitterness and was oh-so-tender. Also added to the chicken soup were a couple of chopped up garlic scapes, which are a new-to-me delicacy. I've been instructed to snap off end of a stem much like you do for an asparagus stalk, and then chop the scape for sautes and soups. It has a delicate garlicy taste without the bite or post-dinner smell.

Next week:
I try to map out where all our food is coming from (to find out how much of our food is coming from within 100-miles, the more accepted "local food" radius) and we enter the second week of no bread. We begin discussing the validity of buying from local millers who mill non-local grains.

What I'm Reading:
Kline, David. Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer's Journal. San Francisco:North Point Press, 1990.

Nabhan, Gary Paul. Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002.

Susann, Jacqueline. Valley of the Dolls. New York: Bantam Books, 1966.

Drinking Soy Milk Like Crazy

Tomorrow our experiment begins. My housemate Alaine and I are going to attempt to eat only food grown and processed within a 150-mile radius of our home in Cambridge, MA. We chose 150 miles because an oft-quoted statistic of the "localvore" set says that the average bite of food in the average American's diet travels 1500 miles from field to fork, and we figured shaving off 90% of the distance was a fair goal. Traveling straight across the country, 1500 miles puts me at the intersection of A Street and S 10th St, in Lincoln, NE (pictured above). If you squint really closely, you can see the soybeans grown for the soymilk I had this morning. Yum! Okay no, but actually, I probably eat something from Nebraska every week, given that its top five agricultural products are cattle and calves, corn, soybeans, hogs, and wheat. So why do I eat so much food from Nebraska? What about Nebraskan soybeans and its other agricultural products make them such a necessary part of my everyday diet? Unfortunately, the answer is not the quality of the product. This isn't to denegrate Nebraskan agriculture - I enjoy a good Nebraskan steak just as much as the next grill-loving Massachusetts resident. But the reason that I eat food that comes from 1500 miles away is that it ends up just one block away from me - at my local Whole Foods Market and Trader Joe's, two grocery stores located within a three-minute walk of my house. And convenience really is king.

So this month, we're changing all that. This month it's all about intentional - or as Thoreau would put it "deliberate" - eating. We're going to try our hardest to get everything within a 150-mile radius, with some exceptions. The important thing is to learn about what we're ingesting, what kind of farms and factories we're supporting, and how we change our local economy and landscape for the better. We were inspired at first by Bill McKibben's wonderfully "Grand Experiment", eating locally during the winter at his home near Burlington, VT. (A considerably larger project, since just about nothing grows during the winter months of the frigid Northeast. We at first thought of trying the same timeframe, but were quickly discouraged by the amount of food we'd have to put up for the season. The advice there is to buy a storage freezer and start your project early.) Now comes Michael Pollan, with his new book The Omnivore's Dilemma, and a myriad other books talking about nutrition, food production and the dinner table. This is an attempt to integrate some of this information into our everyday food choices.

This weekend we're traveling to the Berkshires, so we'll be partaking in the Berkshires' local food offerings as much as possible, and maybe visiting a farmers market and a farm or two.

Now I'm getting back to my half gallon of soy milk which needs to be finished before tomorrow. Please excuse me.

What I'm Reading:

Mass Natural | Michael Pollan | New York Times | 06/04/06
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/060506HA.shtml

Paradise Sold | Steven Shapin | The New Yorker | 05/15/06
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/060515crat_atlarge

A Grand Experiment | Bill McKibben | Gourmet Magazine | July 2005
http://www.transom.org/tools/beginnings/2006/200602_bill_mckibben/gourmet_article.html