Beans!!!

We found beans at the Tacoma Farmers Market today. Kidney beans, pinto beans, and garbanzo beans--which, you must know, are the best beans ever. Alvarez Farms, from Mabton in the Yakima Valley and supplier of some of our vegetables through their exchange with Terry's Berries, is coming to the market this year. We knew we'd eventually find beans, but I haven't taken the time yet to call and try to order any from the sources we've found that may sell them direct. I have actually been hoarding the last two cans of garbanzos in our pantry in case it took us too long to get to eastern Washington to buy some. But now, I don't need to because we have one pound of garbanzo beans. We also bought a couple of pounds of peanuts--we can make our own chunky peanut butter. I was so happy to find beans that I wanted to cry--and next week he's bringing us 10 more pounds of garbanzos and 10 pounds of black beans. The peanuts? A great bonus. I'm not normally a peanut butter fan, but every once in a while I want some on toast or with an apple--and strangely, over the last couple of weeks I've wanted some. Later in the summer, I know we'll order cases of tomatoes and peppers to preserve, plus Alvarez grows melons and potatoes and onions and cucumbers and a lot of other delectable green things.

We also picked up a chicken, two pounds of Italian sausage, and four packages of smoked sausage from Cheryl Ouelette, (a.k.a. Cheryl the Pig Lady). I also asked whether she still has any hams left. In her last newsletter she mentioned that several people had not picked up their hams. Rob especially likes ham, and unless we get another one in the freezer, we won't have any until next spring. We still haven't cooked our spring ham, but I think when we thaw and cook it, I'll repackage and freeze some so it doesn't spoil before we can use it all.

Other things we saw at the market: oysters, crab, shellfish; spring onions, spring greens, herbs, green young garlic; pepper and tomato starts (and other plants); honey. We didn't buy any in part because I'll be out of town next week in Topeka, Kansas. Plus, all the stuff we can't buy: popcorn, pretzels, bread--all looked good, all produced locally and worthy of purchase, but not grown locally, so out of bounds for us. Of course, we did cheat for lunch at the market and had Mexican food. As Ed Murietta pointed out however, none of the food vendors seem to use locally grown foodstuffs: blogs.thenewstribune.com/edsdiner.

Dinner tonight: Mozarella & Ham Sausage from Cheryl's and baked fries made with potatoes from Terry's Berries.

- Natalie

Recovering from a week away from local eating

This week I am settling back into local eating after a forced week off while I was at a disaster training exercise on the other side of the country in Emmitsburg, Maryland last week. I went from spending more than a month eating little other than local food to spend a week eating like I was back in college - institutional food, all you can eat. This meant that I fell back into old habits, without the possibility of eating any local food. And how did it feel going back? Not that good. I felt more sluggish with the return to eating food full of sugar, corn syrup, and other ingredients that are off limits in our Washington eating.

After returning home last weekend, I broke back into local eating by branching out and baking homemade hamburger buns to make barbecue sliders on Sunday. But tonight's meal was even better - barbecued lamb chops with a mint sauce that Natalie made from mint in our yard, served alongside chunky apple sauce from Washington and local potatoes made into baked fries with a dusting of ancho chili powder. With a meal like that, there is no need to think that eating local food is a sacrifice of some kind!

- Rob

Eating local (or not) alone

I intended to do so much this week. I even wrote it down: get the dishes done--every piece of cutlery was dirty; plan all my meals; clean the bathroom; clean the bedroom; get the kitchen nook/office cleaned up; clean the living room; write for the blog; clean the freezer and the refrigerator; buy and preserve asparagus; do laundry; buy bins for the pet food and clear out the pantry area; take donation bags to the second hand store; finish weeding the bottom of the terrace. I'm not sure how I imagined I'd have the time and energy to do that. I got quite a lot done on Sunday even though after I dropped Rob off at the airport I came home and slept the rest of the morning. Still, I got the rest of the terrace weeded, I did most of the dishes (including a fine, obsessive cleaning of the decorative grooves on every piece of cutlery), and I cleaned out the freezer. I even made sausage and pancakes for dinner, which I also had on Monday for breakfast. I took leftover chicken breast and salad and a hunk of cheese to work for lunch, and then came home and made a Northwest Waldorf salad for dinner with more chicken breast, Greek Gods yogurt, a crisp apple, walnuts, and a little mayo.

Tuesday I ate every meal away from home--and thus, none of it likely from Washington. I had a conference in SeaTac and had eggs and a mini-bagel for breakfast. Lunch was a green salad, salmon, and a good vegetable medley with snap peas and thick-julienned carrots, rutabaga, and turnip. Then I came home exhausted, fell asleep on the couch, woke hungry and went to Pour at Four for dinner.

I woke up Wednesday morning with a migraine, took some codeine, called my boss, and then promptly went back to bed for a couple of hours. I ate some toast and cheese for breakfast late on my way into work so that I got there in time for our shareholders meeting. In the afternoon I came home to spend an hour with the dogs before heading back to work for the board and leadership boat cruise. The served something on the boat that they said was salmon. I'm sure it was, but wow, did they ever ruin that poor farm-raised salmon. That fish had no freedom in life and no justice in death. Mushy, flavorless, overcooked, dreck. It tasted like a spawned-out dog fish (Chum). The steak they served was only slightly better.

That brings me to today. I had great intentions this morning of boiling an egg and taking it and an apple and some bread to work. Unfortunately our dog Ada derailed my plans when she found a way out of the fence. Instead of spending time making breakfast, I spent time panicking and looking for her. I then resorted to a total cheat and went to Starbucks on my way into town to get a sausage muffin and an iced tea--with simple syrup. Let me say now that I miss the simple syrup in my iced teas--and it's just not the same with honey. Honey always has an added flavor that I really don't like in my iced tea. I had a lunch meeting at Matador with our new paralegal at work, so that was not native. But, I just took out more sausage and will have that and salad for dinner. I think I'll also cook up some wheat berries to take for breakfast with milk and cinnamon in the morning. Maybe the other sausage for lunch tomorrow, but dinner will be out with Jana before the Oprah.

Okay, so my week alone hasn't gone as well as planned, but I still have tonight to get all those things done that I wanted to do--yeah, right!

- Natalie

Proctor farmers market opens

The Proctor Farmers Market opened today. I wouldn't have known except we saw Bill Evans at the Howard Kunstler lecture this week (pretty depressing lecture, but it made me glad we have started this venture), and he told me that it started today. He also told me that a cheesemaker is at the market this year. So I decided to go this morning after my massage. In all honesty, and embarrassingly, I can't remember the last time we went to the Proctor market. It's been years, and then it was not what we were looking for. It was mostly arts and crafts and not much food. I was pleasantly surprised today at how much food was there, and most of it counts as local for us. The bread and popcorn didn't nor did the jams and chutneys since they contained sugar, but all of the vegetables, the meats, the fish, and of course, the cheese.

We decided before the switch to exempt fish from Alaska because we weren't sure how reliable it would be to only eat fish from Washington state. However, in March we found a cannery in Tokeland that cans crab, Oregon shrimp, tuna, and salmon. The tuna may come from Oregon waters, but it's caught by WA fishers. Then today, I found Wilson Fish Markets (Jania Wilson, 253-722-7100). They are from LaPush and sell line caught King and Coho salmon and Halibut. Hurrah! We don't eat it as often as we probably should--it being a superfood and all--but I do like my salmon and halibut. I bought $30 worth of salmon, including a chunk of frozen king that we'll grill tomorrow, a chunk of smoked coho, and a chunk of smoked king. My executive decision was to allow the brown sugar that is used in smoking since the fish is local, and the exotic ingredient is less than 2% of the full product.

At the Lopez Island Farm stand, I bought Apple Cider Syrup. I was tempted to buy some of their jams, syrups, or chutneys, but they included suga, a substantial portion, and the chutneys included other vegetables that cannot be verified as local. They also sold lamb and pork.

The last stop of the day was the cheese booth. River Valley Ranch sells goat and cow milk cheese. They also make sheep and yak milk cheese. She'd sold out of all but two cheeses by the time I got there. She gave me a taste of Fire Roasted Chevre, and we talked about the Washington eating venture and our Web site. I bought a small log of the chevre and a hunk of Naughty Nellie Raw Cow's Milk ($22.06 for both). I made another temporary exemption since the chevre contains peppers that may not be local and the other is brined in Naughty Nellie Ale.

There are a few things that we are exempting by default--and that, we would probably have to exempt even if we were resourceful enough, efficient enough, organized enough, and had enough time to make all of our own everything from scratch. To make cheese, which we plan to do later this year, you need rennet and culture. Granted, the rennet could come from the stomach lining of a local calf (it's third stomach--listen here http://128.208.34.90/ramgen/realarch/WeekdayA/WeekdayA20070517.rm to learn more), but vegetable rennet is likely exotic. But to get Cheddar cheese, you use a cheddar culture; for gouda, a gouda culture, and so forth. Other things also influence the flavor of cheese: what the cow's eat, local fungi/bacteria, skill of the cheesemaker, etc, but most cheesemakers use a starter culture. It's the same for yogurt and buttermilk. Then there's yeast for bread. Eventually, we'll have our own sourdough starter. You can start sourdough with wild yeast off of cabbage and grapes, but we'll likely use a starter culture or get a start from someone else. We just haven't found that person yet. But, even when we have the starter, we'll likely use yeast sometimes. And, we've exempted other baking necessities such as baking soda, baking powder, creme of tartar, and spices. I'm still waffling on herbs and spices that we can grow here, though. I need to be disciplined enough this year to harvest our own dried herbs like oregano, marjarom, thyme, rosemary, and sage, etc. I should also get organized and plant caraway and cilantro--some to eat fresh and some to harvest as coriander. I'll look next week at the market for more herbs to transplant.

I also ordered another rain barrel from Dan Borba for $70 and bought two bundles of cilantro for $1 each, eight assorted tomato plants to transplant at $2.50 each, four pots of spinach to grow, three flat leaf parsley plants, and three African daisies to put in the terrace ($30). Next week we might by cauliflower, cabbage, blueberry bushes, and some more tomatoes.

Rob was home from the Birdathon Kickoff, where he lead a short birding by bike trip. While he showered off bike sweat, I assembled a salad with greens from Terry's Berries topped with smoked salmon, frozen blueberries, Naughty Nellie cheese, hazelnuts (bought from OR pre-switch), and a vinaigrette I made with raspberry vinegar, dried spice mix, olive oil, and the apple cider syrup.

I think we'll be regulars at the market this year. Join us, every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

- Natalie

A challenging week of temptations

I knew when we took on this challenge that there would be times when the temptation to fall back into old habits would be especially strong. This week I was definitely challenged. It started with a bad headache on Tuesday night, when I had to work late and then missed the 7:20 p.m. bus home, which led to my asking Natalie to drive down and pick me up so I didn't have to hang out at the office until the next bus at 8:20 p.m. By the time she arrived, my headache was progressing to a migraine, so I suggested eating out.

Months ago when we started making our own ground rules for a Washington eating year, we set the standards for how many times we could go out in a given week. We agreed that eating two meals per week at restaurants would be acceptable. So, Tuesday night's meal of American-Mexican food at Matador in downtown Tacoma was our first meal out for the week.

Our second meal out for the week was at Ravenous in downtown Tacoma, as we had to squeeze in a meal before attending a lecture by James Arthur Kunstler.

So, with two times out finished for the week, it meant we wouldn't be able to visit our friends at Pour at Four, a wine bar in our neighborhood in Tacoma's North End.

The worst of it, though, has been the temptation of seeing my co-workers coming back from Tully's with lattes. I had the bad habit of drinking a grande vanilla latte every other day - sometimes every day - and going cold turkey for this entire month has been tough. Sure, I brew French-pressed coffee at work, since we made coffee on of the exempt items in our Washington eating year. But it isn't the same.

Despite the temptations, I managed to stick to the regime. Now it is Saturday afternoon and if I want a latte I can just make one here at home. It's just another week in the experiment.

- Rob

Breakfast has been a challenge

Breakfast has been a challenge. It's not a resources challenge, we have plenty to choose from. It's a timing and habits challenge. Since I haven't been leaving the building to take a morning break and get breakfast at Starbucks, I find that I don't actually eat the breakfasts I take to work unless they can be eaten a few bites at a time. Oatmeal, which really isn't good once it has cooled, does not work well if eaten over more than an hour.

On Tuesday I had to scavenge for breakfast. It ended up being toast made from the two slices of honey wheat bread that I accidentally left at work the night before - and a Snickers bar that was in my desk from before the switch. Why? Well, Rob and I didn't communicate very well that morning. He asked whether I wanted oatmeal. Oatmeal sounded pretty disgusting when he asked me - I rarely feel like eating first thing after getting up in the morning. I said no, but I didn't ask for anything else, and he didn't put anything together for me. So, bread and snickers. Which made me realize, I need to stock the cupboards, so to say, at work. I need protein at breakfast. Not a lot of protein, but more than is in a bowl of oatmeal or cereal. Usually a little yogurt or an ounce or so of cheese or an egg will do. So, we'll have to keep some boiled eggs on hand. I can take boiled eggs, some cheese, and cups of Greek Gods yogurt to work. That, the occasional slice of toast - I found a hidden toaster at work - will make due for breakfast. And, when we've eaten through the oatmeal we have at home, we'll be eating wheatberries and BlueBird Granary cereal for breakfast.

I found today that oatmeal reheats okay in the microwave. Just have to sprinkle it with a bit of water before zapping it. It's pretty good topped with cinnamon, honey, and milk that I took to work, and sprinkled with chopped walnuts that I still have in my desk.

- Natalie

Greek Gods yogurt

Greek Gods Yogurt is made with milk from Washington!!!! I'm so happy to know this. I feel like dancing around and singing, "Yay, yay, yay," but that's not really in my nature. Greek Gods' yogurt is yummy. Even the plain yogurt is good, which is all we'll be able to buy and eat since all of the flavored yogurts contain sugar--even the honey one. Still, since it's made with Washington milk, and it is my all-time favorite yogurt, we can add our own honey and frozen blue berries and raspberries from Terry's Berries, I have another breakfast option.

- Natalie

DC Whole Foods irony

I find deep irony in the fact that I went to a Whole Foods in Washington, DC, to try to find local foods. I found very, very few. I found some local foods from Washington State, though--apples and potatoes, maybe even the onions. I went to pick up a few things to keep in the hotel room since I had a refrigerator and was going to be there for a week. Normally, when I am traveling I like to keep bananas and granola bars on hand. I'm not a morning person, and these make good portable breakfasts. Plus, in DC on meeting days, it's a good idea to have a granola bar in your bag since you may not find time to eat until late in the evening. If I have a refrigerator, I sometimes also buy some yogurt and cheese and other fruit. So I went to the cheese station and asked one of the salespeople whether they had any locally-made cheeses. She took me around the case and showed me a few cheeses--apparently Wisconsin is a local manufacturer of cheese if you are in Washington, DC. Luckily there were also a few made in Maryland and Virginia. I picked up a chunk of Naturalist's Cheese made in Virginia. I skipped the bananas, but I did buy a pint container of sliced fruit, including oranges. I figure they may at least have been grown in this country, rather than wherever bananas come from. I also bought two bottles of HonesTea and a box of Kashi granola bars. I was so busy on this trip though, that I never had a chance to eat the cheese. So, am taking it home. One of the rules we have established is that we will honor a food as local if we or someone we know travels somewhere and buys something grown within 100 miles of where they are, and brings it home. This cheese counts. And later this summer, we'll have more maple syrup when Jana and Jason bring us some from Massachusetts.

- Natalie

Local eating in the news today

Issues about local eating have grown so mainstream over the last year that we have moved from a world where the idea that grew popular through books and Web sites is now drawing two editorials in the same newspaper in the same day.

The Seattle P-I offers the following:

• Good reasons to support local farmers, by guest columnist Jennifer Wilkins

• That mouthful shouldn't travel so far, by guest columnist Paul W. Birkeland

Meanwhile, I am planning to attend a discussion about local eating at my local bookstore here in Tacoma, Washington - King's Books. The community Web site Exit133.com highlights Thursday night's discussion, which will include Terry Carkner from Terry's Berries on the panel. I look forward to an interesting conversation and maybe sharing a few of the tips that Natalie and I have discovered in our research before starting a local eating year, a Washington-only food year, on April 1, 2008.

- Rob

Day 1

Yesterday I had a breakfast sandwich at Starbucks--sausage and cheddar on an English Muffin. I have no idea where any of it came from. I have no idea where it was even processed and packaged. I also had my last iced tea lemonade. At least it was sweetened with sugar syrup instead of corn syrup. Still, lemons from where? Grown and processed where? I can get that drink in any Starbucks anywhere in the nation and at any time of year.

For lunch I went to the cafeteria upstairs because I was desperate to get lunch before my afternoon meetings. Our cafeteria is operated by one of those services that staff corporate cafeterias. The food is mass produced and comes out of big box trucks. They serve mediocre fare that you'd find in an airport. I grew weary of it a long time ago. Nevertheless, without enough time to hit one of the locally-owned restaurants nearby, I hoped they'd at least have some soup that I could eat. They were out of the vegetable soup and I won't eat the broccoli-cheese soup. The special of the day was "confetti" taco salad. Of course the lettuce was iceburg with a few shreds of cabbage and carrot. It came out of a bag. It was tasteless. It was completely anonymous. I asked if they could put the ingredients into a burrito for me. In went slightly seasoned ground beef, a few shreds of lettuce, tubbed salsa, sour cream, and cheddar shreds. I asked them to add pickled jalapenos but passed on the anemic and mushy looking tomatoes and nstead of pre-made, overly-salted, out-of-a-tub guacamole, I asked for fresh avocado. I love avocado. I will miss avocado this year. I took the mess back to my desk and worked through lunch.

Last night for dinner we ate the leftover Indian food we got at Gateway to India on Sunday night.

At midnight the switch flipped--whether it clicked on or off I'll leave to you to decide. Actually, the switch is in more of a slide because we didn't plan ahead well enough. Rob spent most of the night making bread out of that nice wheat we got, plus some molasses we have in the cupboard and need to use. Cool, we have bread. So we knew we'd at least have bread for today.

Only about 1/2 of our food today was grown in Washington. It might be a while before we have entire days where everything we eat is from the state because we have a lot of stuff in the house.

For breakfast Rob made oatmeal and tossed in some dried and sweetened cranberries. I don't really like to eat immediately after I get up, so he put mine in a plastic container. Unfortunately, he didn't add any sweetener. I really don't like unsweetened oatmeal. So, when I got to work and finally reheated it, I added a packet of sugar that was in my desk. When I started eating, I realized that we need new containers because the one the cereal was in smelled of onion and garlic. The smell has permeated the plastic. That did not make the oatmeal any more appealing. Normally I like oatmeal, but this morning I could barely choke down half of it. Even if I had been able to eat all of it, 3/4 cup of oatmeal would not keep me satisfied until lunch. So, around 10 a.m. I ate the second half of a biscotti that was in my desk from Friday.

I pulled out lunch around 2:00. Two thick slices of the bread Rob made last night, two slices of the cheese that Sue brought us from Denmark, a pear, and an apple. I never got to the apple.

This evening I went to a reception for work. They served chicken satay, stuffed mushrooms, salumi, crudites, the normal reception spread. I pondered our rule for being able to eat whatever is served us at friends and when traveling. But, this was not a friend and I'm not on the road. I opted to eat a single chunk of Cougar Gold cheese. I don't think I'd be too far off to guess that the chicken was grown in Washington, but the peanut sauce definitely had some alien ingredients.

We read last night on the Golden Glen Creamery Web site that Stadium Thriftway carries their products. I wanted to see what they carried--I'd really like to find a local store that carries their cheese. We also needed to pick up a chicken for dinner. The don't carry Golden Glen's cheese, just their milk--not even their cream or half and half. They also carried some apples and a couple of vegetables from Washington. I got really excited for a few seconds when I saw the sign in their meat department for Misty Isle Beef. It is the most delectable, melt-in-your-mouth beef, and it's organic and grown on Vashon Island. But, alas, they switched almost a year ago (just haven't changed their signage or advertising for some half-assed reason) to Painted Hills Beef, which is out of Oregon. Nevertheless, plenty of their chickens are grown in Washington. We picked up a free range fryer. Unfortunately dinner didn't go quite as planned. The chicken still was not done after nearly two hours in the oven. I chalk it up to the fact that it was still a little frozen inside when we got it home. We ate the cooked bits along with fingerling potatoes from Terry's Berries and canned green beans grown and canned by Rob's parents, who live in Fall City. Desert was a piece of fudge--chocolate is, after all, exempt.

- Natalie

A year of local eating begins

Really, what business do we have taking on this self-imposed challenge of trying to eat only foods grown in Washington? We are the last characters that you'd think would try this. We are a couple who eats out almost every night—sometimes nearly every meal in a week.

We certainly don't look like the typical granola munchers who you'd think would embrace something like this. I'm not likely to be cast in any role addressing healthy choices. I weigh twice what an average woman my height should. So nearly everyone who looks at me would not imagine me doing anything like this. And, although Rob is a runner, he isn't trotting around town in the Tevas, cargo pants, and REI polar fleece costume.

So why are we doing this? Are we crazy? Maybe, I've never claimed to be incredibly sane. Are we deluding ourselves? Quite possibly. Are we ready? We think so, but we expect some surprises from the wings to smack us upside the head. We're prepared for the frustration that this new script is going to create. We're certainly not heading into this without direction since we've spent much of the last six months researching it

What, you may ask, are we doing? We're joining the latest sustainability meme. You may have heard of something called The Hundred Mile Diet or of Locavores. We've put our own spin on it. For at least the next twelve months we will eat only foods grown in Washington State, (with a few exceptions).

Why? Because we can. Because, like the mountain, it is there, it is a challenge, it is something to do. Plus, it will be fun. Oh, you really want to know why?

We don't have a simple answer. Right now it feels like this is where we've been heading for a while. It's close to where we want to be. It's in the wings sitting with the Platonic ideals of who we think we should be.

Part of this originates in a sense of patriotism that few would recognize as such. Distributed food production is important to our security as a nation and as a species. When too much of our food is grown in other countries, when too much of our farmland is paved over for housing and strip malls, when too much of our food has to travel from the heartland or across the country or around the world, we—as a nation, a bio-region, a community—put ourselves at risk. Small farmers who nurture their soil and grow the right foods at the right time, in the right place, with the right materials will help keep our food supply safe—not to mention our air and water and land. (And yes, we realize this is somewhat subjective, but we have our own ideas of what "right" is in this case.)

For more than a decade, Rob and I have tried to support our local economy by buying local products from local businesses, even if it cost us a few dollars more. Competition between small businesses creates options that we value. We value the local economy. We value our community. Ultimately, no matter how complex the problem, we want to be more connected to our food; we want to cut the distance (in all of its translations) between us and our food; and, mostly, we want to support local farmers. But, we wanted to go further. The stage was set.

Act I: We peaked under the curtain three years ago when we joined a CSA in the Puyallup River Valley, Terry's Berries. We wanted to find a local CSA after we read about them in magazines like Organic Gardening, Sunset, Utne Reader, and Orion and books that discussed sustainability. When CSAs first started popping up in magazines, we couldn't find one to join in Pierce County. Then when we could, we couldn't afford it. Our business, White Rabbit Publishing, was a casualty of the dot-com bomb. But, three years ago, when we again had enough income to make the up front investment that most CSAs require, we read about Terry's Berries. Then we met Terry Carkner and her crew at the Tacoma Farmers Market. She still had a few spaces left for her summer share and we hopped at the chance to join.

Cool, huh? It was cool, but we weren't ready.

Let me tell you a little bit about our lives at that point. Rob and I both were fairly new to jobs that we love, but our responsibilities in our jobs grew quickly, our roles kept changing, and that took more energy and time than we'd anticipated. Plus, we were finishing our third book, Washington Disasters. On top of that, we were nearing the end of a grueling two-year stint as co-presidents of the Tahoma Audubon Society. When you are as busy as we were, something has to give. What gave was our garden, our home, and time to regularly plan meals and cook.

We turned to an easy, albeit not inexpensive, solution. Have you noticed how many good restaurants have opened in Tacoma over the last three years? We have. And, we've tried nearly every one of them. Okay, that might not be true, but we have tried quite a few of them. There are a couple that we go to again and again and again and again and ag...you get the picture. The one redemptive quality about our restaurant habit is that we choose locally-owned restaurants like Primo Grill, Pour at Four, and the Rosewood Cafe, and we avoid big chain slop joints that serve boring mass-produced pablum. Still, not a great way to save money, lose weight, eat locally, or maintain any sort of balance.

Act II: Takes place in Spring 2007. By this time we were cooking at home a little more, and I'd lost 25 pounds. The remainder of the act resembles the first. In May, we read an article in the News Tribune by Ed Murrieta, A pig dies, a meal is born, a local farmer pays her bills, about Cheryl the Pig Lady. This was followed the same week by our standard Thursday trip to the Tacoma Farmers Market where we met Cheryl Ouelette, who sold us one of two remaining half-shares for a summer worth of meat.

Then, enter Barbara Kingsolver, Alisa Smith, and J.B. MacKinnon. Late last year after reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Kingsolver and Plenty (called the 100 Mile Diet in Canada) by Smith & MacKinnon, we decided we would re-enact their local-eating dramas.

We're not following this scripts exactly. We've re-written it a bit so that it's more feasible for folks who aren't quite as committed nor willing to restrict their lives as much. We also hope that this Website and blog become resources for others who want to incorporate this into their lives.

And, thus, begins Act III.

- Natalie