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

The Five-Finger Challenge

Being vegan has become too easy. That is, my decision not to eat any animal products was intended as something that would force me to make a conscious choice about everything I bought or put in my body. But after more than 4 years of veganism, my label-reading and purchasing choices have turned into a routine. I already know what brands and products I can buy at the grocery store, and exactly what I can order at nearly all the restaurants in town. I stopped caring about ingredients with names I can't pronounce, and even about shopping local in order to put food in my belly and make sure I can pay my rent. I have become a penny-pinching vegan robot.

But my friends, I am about to be reprogrammed. Starting today I have resolved to eat only local, seasonal foods. Sounds impossible, right? No salt, no pepper, no curry, no bananas, no olive oil? Not exactly. I'm going to start small, with one 90% local meal a day, and build from there. From my experience with a vegan diet, I know that this locavore imperative will only get easier. I propose for myself, and anyone else who wants to join me, the Five-Finger Challenge, named so because my "local" foods will be defined by having come from within the lower peninsula of Michigan, and everyone who's ever been to Michigan knows that us residents seem to associate our state and where we're from with the palm of our hand.

And so, the Five-Finger Challenge begins.