Day One

My shelf is in need of a food makeover.

Okay, the sour cream potato chips and Kit Kats aren't mine, but many shoppers with tight budgets might recognize that most of these products come from Aldi, a discount supermarket chain started in Europe known for no frills and low prices. Aldi is so cheap, you have to pay for grocery bags and make a deposit to use a shopping cart, so you'd better bring your bags and put the cart back where you got it from without relying on a store employee to do it for you. Also visible on this shelf is food purchased at Trader Joe's, owned by a family trust set up by one of the original owners of Aldi. Few of these products provide any information about where they are from.

None of these ingredients would do for my challenge, so I headed to the People's Food Co-op to see what was in season for my first day of local eating.

I was shocked to see how little variety I had in terms of Michigan products. The organic area of the produce section was lined with vegetables from California, Washington, Pennsylvania, and other states and countries.

These were my fresh, local produce choices: chard, kale, baby kale and mustard greens, apples, spinach, or potatoes. The spinach and baby greens were from Earthworks Farm, which is an amazing organization, but were priced well out of my budget. What has our food system come to when organic spinach from California is $3.99/lb, and from Detroit is over $4 for less than half a pound?

This is what I came away with:

Organic fingerling potatoes on "last chance sale" for 99 cents/lb from Tantre Farm (great find, but mischarged for $1.99/lb, should have been more careful!)
Conventional Jonathan and Ida Red apples grown by Alex Nemeth in Ypsilanti for .99/lb
A bunch of pesticide-free curly kale for $2.49 from Goetz Farm
A container of bulk organic dried Michigan cranberries for $5.87 (.45 lb)

What could I make out of this motley crew of ingredients?

I put together a fresh kale and apple salad with cranberries, ginger and apple cider vinegar, and also boiled and mashed the potatoes with some salt, canola oil, nutritional yeast and garlic my friend grew (Jeremy, you're a lifesaver!).

I also cooked up some Ann Arbor made tofu (no clue where the soy beans came from) I already had with canola oil, sage leaves, salt, and local bee pollen I happened to have in the fridge.

My thoughts on today? One, eventually replacing my cooking oils with local ones will not be easy. Only options I can think of at the moment are rapeseed/canola and sunflower oil, and both present their own challenges. On a more positive note: thank goodness for Michigan apples!



Michigan music today: Diana Ross