Eating Local

I am a fan of eating local when possible. Regardless of whatever else companies might be doing, if the product is local, it has been transported less distance. There are other factors and you can (I certainly do) drive yourself crazy picking the best option. Is the company local but making products with food shipped in from wherever? Certainly the guy at the farmer's market selling organic bananas isn't growing them in Watsonville. I support Clover-Stornetta farms not only because of their Moo-Cow billboards, but because they have signs outside various random local dairies giving me at least the impression that they are sourcing dairy products locallly, and in fact supporting local dairies outside of ones they own. And they have a good variety of Organic products. Of course being an extremely self-flagellating holy environmental warrior I wonder how much I don't know. In the end, they also donated a crapload of land near Manchester California for public open space, so they can't be all bad.

Anyway, the best way to verify you are eating locally produced food - produce it yourself. Tonight we'll be dining on some serious argula and spinach from our winter garden. I spent more time trying to verify how I am supposed to harvest this stuff than actually harvesting it. The theory is that you cut the shoots and the stuff grows back (and in fact if you don't cut it back, it goes to seed, as I found out with my basil this summer).

Here are the results!