A Year of Eating Locally

By Jim Howitt and Ann Lewandowski

For the last two summers, The Wedge and other co-ops issued The Eat Local Challenge, enouraging people to increase the amount of local food in their diets during a four-week period. It felt too easy when we took the challenge during the heart of the local harvest season in August 2007, so we upped the ante for ourselves. For a full year we weighed all the food bought or harvested from our garden to find out how good we were at being year-round "localvores."

We guessed that we were already pretty good about eating local food, and we wanted to find out if that was true without making drastic changes to our diet. We make most of our food choices based on quality and, happily, there is a lot of overlap between high-quality and locally produced food. We also love cuisines from around the world; our pantry is filled with quinoa, olive oil, palm oil, Spanish cheeses, coconut milk, Indian spices...the list goes on. How would local compare to those imports?

As it turned out, 45% of our food for the entire year was grown locally, coming from grocery stores (23%), farmers' markets (17%), and our own garden (5%). We were below 50% local from December through July, with a low of 11% the second half of April. In August through November our local purchases were over 50%, with a high of 84% the first half of October. In those two weeks, we brought home over 250 pounds of produce from our garden, The Wedge, and especially the Minneapolis Farmers' Market, all transported home on our bicycles (how's that for keeping the carbon footprint low?).

Forty-five percent seemed like a surprise, any way we looked at it. It must be incredibly low compared to 100 years ago. It also seemed much higher than the average American's diet, since we were making heavy use of our own garden, local farmers, and a grocery store with a strong commitment to local produce. Surprise or not, here's how we made nearly half our diet come from local sources.

Home food preservation is vital to being a year-round localvore. It was eye-opening to see just how little local food was available in late winter and early spring. Our garden parsnips, leeks, and Brussels sprouts taste better than any we have purchased, so we grew as much as our space allowed and froze them. Similarly, we stocked up on squash, apples, and red bell peppers from our favorite growers at the Minneapolis Farmers' Market. Though the growing season was short, canning and freezing made the enjoyment season last until spring. A package of leeks from the freezer not only gave us a local option for dinner, it got us excited about next year's garden.

Without canning and freezing, our annual local intake would only have been about 35%, instead of 45%, of the total. We preserved 275 lbs of local food over the course of the year.

We were amazed at how productive our garden was. Five percent of all our food came from a 12-by-24 foot plot. Out of that little space, we coaxed a six-to-twelve month supply of leeks, parsnips, garlic, Brussels sprouts, and kale. We also had fresh string beans and peas for a couple months, and snacking quantities of a few other veggies. It felt good to discover that we could make a significant contribution to our diet from such a small plot of city land.

Everything we did in the way of gardening, preserving, and trips to the Farmers' Market is only half the story, and half the food. The other half came from stores, primarily The Wedge. We depended heavily on the buyers and workers at The Wedge, who are committed to knowing the area's highest-quality producers. Their efforts meant we didn't need to do more than read the shelf signs in order to bring in half of our local food.

Our only expectation, when we started our experiment, was to find out how closely our behavior matched our values. We found out that being a localvore isn't a passive thing. The more energy we put into it, the more local we got. Some of the work was easy, like picking the correct item from the shelf. Some of it took more time, like weeding the garden. None of it was hard, and our reward was a year of fantastic meals.

Jim Howitt and Ann Lewandowski are members of The Wedge and Eastside coops and garden at Soo Line Community Garden. In one year, they ate 3,153 pounds of food.