Perpetual Carouse

We started the Eat Local Challenge a few days early, to maximize farmers' market opportunities, so today is day three. We've certainly shopped locally, although the eating part is really just starting, owing to a couple backyard BBQs we attended over the weekend.

We did start off Saturday doing our part, however. $22 at the farmers' market netted a pound of mushrooms, a dozen eggs, a pound of salad greens, a bag of sugar-snap peas and a couple of red and yellow onions with the greens, and a cup of really good, if not horribly slow-to-arrive, locally-roasted coffee.

Not a bad haul, I suppose, but it did reinforce my feeling that local & sustainable means "spendy" (example: five bucks for eggs). I'm not sure if the price of everything represented the much talked about "true cost of food" or if it represents "Berkeley farmers' market chic" but I suspect the true answer lies somewhere in between those two.

I also went a little overboard and spent $14 on two kinds of local bacon, but it will be delicious, and, well, I love bacon. Plus I reasoned that by cooking everything in bacon-fat, we'll be staying truer to the sprit of this thing than if we cook in olive oil from faraway lands. If that sounds like an attempt to justify $14 worth of bacon while we're trying to eat on a budget, that's because it is.

We also spent $23 on beer (local, for Sunday's BBQ), milk (local, organic, and significantly more expensive than both the regular and giant corporate organic varieties) and Nestle Quik, which my better half needs to survive, and is therefore non-negotiable.

Last night, I made garlic-rosemary chicken with polenta. It turned into an excellent lunch today, along with some of the salad greens. We'll happily eat the leftovers again tonight, but I know that after two or three meals max, I'll need to change things up.

I've run into an interesting problem as far as the budget end is concerned. I've used a few items that were already in my kitchen before the challenge. I don't really know what they cost, and I'm not interested in turning this whole thing into a giant math problem.

I think I'm not going to count them. My logic is that there will be other things that I'll buy this week that won't end up getting eaten until after the challenge, so it should all sort of come out in the wash. I know there are a lot of people being more hardcore about it, but I just don't have the time, and frankly I don't see the point of undertaking this challenge if you can't do it in at least a semi-realistic way. There probably are some bean-counters out there that are usually super technical about such matters, but that's just not how we really are.

So far, so good. It does feel nice to be consciously supporting local food, but it's definitely more consuming of time, money and mental energy.