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