I am known as something of an organizational nutcase. This is fine by me. I like being a resource person. When my daughter was a baby, I decided that we needed both a financial and a sustainable overhaul of our food sources. I wanted to be able to eat healthy, organic, and local food, and I wanted to do it on a limited budget. At the time I was not working, and things were quite tight. I’m sure that many of you can relate.
Today, I have personal connections with a number of local farms and farmers, and I am happy to say that we do eat healthy, sustainable food on a budget. It took a year of planning and experimenting, but it wasn’t that hard, actually. If you would like to do the same, here’s how I did it.
I thought about what we ate. We needed vegetables all year round. These were easy to get locally in the summer, more challenging in the winter time. We needed fruit all year round too. Again, easy to find in the summer, challenging in the winter. We also needed household staples like flour and baking powder.
I did some research on our local farms. Now, we live in the suburbs of a major city, so by local I mean less than a two-hour drive away.
I looked for local farms that sold vegetables, and I discovered that there was an organization that provided farm shares of local, organic vegetables from June to November. We signed up. I did a price comparison of the local and organic vegetable and fruit delivery services and discovered that one was much cheaper than the others. We signed up for that one, particularly for the December to June period.
Next, I looked for fruit. I visited the farmer’s market and talked to people there, realizing that they sold berries that I could freeze. I made a bulk pre-order so it would be simple to go and pick up the berries. I discovered a wonderful organic farm an hour and a half’s drive away that would pick a thousand pounds of blueberries for me at a time, and I rented a truck and went there, getting berries for myself and at least a dozen friends.
Now to baking. Through my growing network of food-loving friends, I heard about an initiative to grow local wheat in the rainforest, and I signed up. I also created a buying co-op for an organic distributor and purchased items like aluminum-free baking powder at wholesale cost.
I’m still working on the meat. We don’t eat much meat, but what we do get is either through a distributor from one of the local farms who comes into town every couple of months, or it’s from our delivery service.
The key to creating an annual food plan is as follows:
Plan ahead. Order your produce ahead of time and develop a relationship with the farmer. Those who show up on the day, demanding 40 pounds of berries, may walk off with nothing. Those who plan ahead for 1000 pounds get what they are looking for.
Plan to buy in bulk. Save money every month so that you are able to do this. Bulk is cheaper and makes it much easier to buy local and organic.
Get a freezer. It’s well worth the energy if you fill it with local berries.
Do you have any tips for eating local and sustainable food?