A new year, and a new project

One of the things that bothers me when listening to folks talk about local food, is that it seems to most people that when they think of local food, they appear to think that it is also expensive. A number of times, I've heard "I'd buy local, but I can't afford it" from people when asked why they don't buy locally more often on the various interviews and articles that have been written.

Personally, I believe that it is quite the opposite. True, local food is probably more expensive in terms of the time that it takes to process, preserve, or otherwise prepare the food so that you can still be eating local asparagus in January, but, since that asparagus was bought at the peak of the season, and in larger quantity, it SHOULD be cheaper than asparagus that is flown in from Chile, Argentina, or wherever. I'm not sure if the misconception stems from the fact that some people associate "local" with "organic" (which may be more expensive, but it depends on the farm), or if people see the somewhat exorbitant prices that sometimes appear at the large urban markets, and think that is the REAL cost of local food (a good example is that we found 20lbs of stewing tomatoes at one of the urban markets downtown for $12-15, but that same box was $7 at the farm gate... and since for us it was either 40 km into town, or 35km to the farm, guess where we went?).

So, what we will be trying to do with this blog is, over the next year, try and record each supper that we've made, and provide what a similar cost is if we had bought the ingredients for the meal from a non-local, non-seasonal source. This will also serve to record, for us, how successfully we are sticking to our goal of "eating as locally as possible".

So, without further ado, for New Years dinner, we had:

• T-Bone steak
  
• Roast Potatoes
• Cauliflower
• Asparagus

The steaks were from the 1/2 cow that we bought (for around $3.75 a lb) from a farmer 25 km away, the potatoes are the least local (just standard bag-o-potatoes from Quebec bought at our local grocer), the cauliflower (< $2.00 per head) and asparagus ($2.00 per lb) are both from the vegetable farm that is 5km away when they were in season and preserved (blanched and frozen).