Local for the Win....

Its lunchtime and I’m sitting here enjoying a lovely cream of corn soup. It hit me when I was making this the other day that so much of it was local. There was the chicken stock made from the chickens our friends raised for us. There was corn from the freezer and stored potatoes from the summer CSA share. The cream was from the local dairy.

There are some parts that are not local… salt, pepper, bay leaf, garlic, celery. The onion wasn’t from our CSA but it was local grown.

I remember the start of 2010 and my decision experiment with local after 'experimenting' over 2009. I don’t regret it, it has turned out to be a great choice and, shockingly, frugal.

The “shocking” part of this came during my budget review when 2010 was compared with 2009 - our food costs were down about 1,000.00.

Suffice it to say if you end up paying a high premium for local produce you get quite serious fast about using every bit. That is about the only reason I can come up with on why local, premium priced food ran us less overall - because it shouldn’t have.

I was even trying NOT to be wasteful in 2009. I am going to guess either the cost per item may have been cheaper but weight per unit was less, we were eating more processed items than I realized or we didn’t “recycle/reuse” as much of the food as I thought we did. Most likely it was some random combination.

As I was eating lunch today it did start to seem plausible……

This soup I’m eating is the last bowl. This soup started as a chicken dinner, the leftover chicken made a few servings of chicken salad for lunches and then the carcass went for stock.

The stock came from spices, onions and garlic. The celery was in the freezer leftover from thanksgiving.

Corn was from summer overage in the CSA share and potatoes from the last few shares in the fall.

Sooooo………….If I figure that the chicken “cost” for this meal 5.25 (chicken cost divided over the number of meals, organic homegrown chicken isn’t cheap and it shouldn’t be), spices I’ll put in as 1.00 as the ones used are bulk purchases so the 1.00 is high, 3.14 in corn, 3.14 in potatoes (just the CSA weekly share cost divided by 7 for days… can’t figure how else to show cost), 1.00 for cream and about .20 in onion and .15 in celery. Grand total is about 15.00 for a giant pot of soup.

Again… 15.00 for soup is EXPENSIVE soup.

But if 15.00 is divided over three meals (dinner and two lunches), you are looking at 5.00 to feed all three of us…. Or 1.67 per person… Considering we still have more veggie goodies stored away… suddenly the savings make sense.

I’m sure if I followed the same principals out of the grocery store I’d save the down payment on a car. However local for us is about health, community and supporting local farmers… For whatever reason, I also can’t deny that it was a money saver.

I’m sad to be using the last butternut squash, last sweet potatoes, last storage potatoes… Getting down to just berries, corn, pumpkin and green beans in the freezer…

And we’re starting to bring in some frozen veggies and fruit from the market. I think we’ll run out in about April of all our frozen and pantry stores…..No more trips just for cleaning supplies and some staples. Sigh.

Local eats…..It was a good experience and we will be repeating it.

We’ll raise chickens and a pig with friends (or lets be honest they’ll raise and we’ll sing their praises). We will run to the local dairy and we’ll stick with a CSA for our beef and lamb. If I suggest any MUST to any person, go local for meat/dairy…all other social/political ramifications aside… it was like my childhood came alive on my tongue… I always thought my taste buds had changed…. NOPE… just the stuff on the meat shelf at your market isn’t the same…. Go local and you’ll never go back.

We’ll start our produce CSA with a spring share in March, a giant main season share (for freezing extras) and end with a late fall share to carry us through winter. I’ll repeat and increase my stock up on some hardy veggies that store well in our 1910 home that has a good old fashioned, unheated pantry.

New for 2011 is to get a bit more serious about bread and pasta…. I’ll batch and freeze if necessary. I’m going to can some fully processed foods we enjoy such as, pickles, tomato sauce and jams. I have peach jam I canned that seems to be holding out… if I eat it and don’t die I’ll give it another go :-) I’m also going to be better about having a stock scrap container in the freezer for some of our bits and parts that can still serve yet another purpose.

To sum it up: Community Supported Agriculture plus local dairy plus local meat = win.