In the Beginning

I suppose it is only polite to start off with a bit of an introduction. This blog is a family project, detailing the adventures that we're having in trying to live a "sustainable" life, in the middle of central Canada.

We actually started our adventure about a year ago, after reading "The 100 Mile Diet". C. and I both grew up in households of modest means, and had mothers that canned and preserved, and both of our families generally lived a "local" lifestyle. We both lived within semi-agricultural villages at points in our childhood, and learned quite early on where our food came from. It was against this backdrop that our adventure in local eating and sustainable living is set.

So far, we're not doing too badly, I think, at least from the "local eating" point of view. We have bought most of our meat a quarter or side at a time from local farmers, and try and find those that are "organic", and small scale where possible. We are diligent about buying our fruits and vegetables in season and canning or freezing them, and we've even just recently found local supplies of flour, eggs, and garlic. This last was one of our major problems last winter, as we were both very reticent to buy bulb garlic that was flown in from China or Argentina, and settled instead for bottled minced garlic from the Magdelene Islands, which are only 800km or so away.

White and brown sugar has been replaced in our pantry by honey. This has proven a bit of a challenge for C. as she loves cooking in all of the various forms, and only having honey or maple syrup as sweetening agents means that just about every recipe needs to be modified.

Now - we HAVE made a few concessions, and perhaps cheated a bit. For instance, my parents work as humanitarian project managers in Central America, and consequently travel to that part of the world a couple of times a year. During their trips, they usually bring back copious quantities of coffee that they purchase from a co-op down there (for about 1/5 the price of similar "fair trade" coffee here... and they pay the co-op more than the fair trade shippers do). So we get our coffee with the justification that that airplane was flying them back anyways and an extra 20lbs didn't noticeably alter either the carbon footprint, and the co-op is better off because of their patronage. I'm sure some would decry this logic as sophistry, but it does allow me to indulge my caffeine habit.

So, against that backdrop, our goals with this blog are to chronicle our adventure, share some of our findings in the hope of helping others in the Montreal area to also live a more local and sustainable life, share some recipes from our culinary experiments, and hopefully glean some advice and insights from others that are trying the same experiment we are.