instead of Uggs, mukluk boots

[Catrin]

I buy locally where I can and when I can afford it. Am more concerned with helping to support the small local businesses rather than anything else. Also, I really like being able to visit the farm(s) where most of my meat and poultry come from so I KNOW how they were raised. I tend to know the farmers that provide my animal protein rather better than those who produce my vegetables. My food budget is only so large, and it is larger than it once was, but I prefer this approach.

[Crankin]

Jolt, I guess the point I was trying to make, is that I am eating fresh (and flown here) blueberries and oranges, etc. year round. I can't do frozen. I buy locally when I can. Like Shooting Star, I am not a gardner, in fact my thumb is brown. I find it frustrating as hell! So, I am lucky there are at least 5-7 small farms within 10 miles of my house. When I can't go there, I go to a gourmet farm market, which grows stuff that is local, but also ships stuff in. I have never gone there and not found what I wanted, in terms of weird ingredients. They started as a farm, and now they are a market that has baked goods from local bakeries, wine and beer, locally grown meats, and a selection of cheeses I could die for. Thankfully, when I moved, it was further away from this place.

[OakLeaf]

Well, leaving aside for the moment, repeating that I was talking about policy choices and NOT individual choices ...

you gotta love these industry-funded "studies" that compare half of one thing with all of another. Yeah, you know in California, vegetables just magically transport themselves from the farms onto the big trucks that take them to New York ... while vegetables that are going to the farmers' market instead of the industrial depot, have to rely on small trucks ...

[malkin]

Jolt, I guess the point I was trying to make, is that I am eating fresh (and flown here) blueberries and oranges, etc. year round. I can't do frozen...

Why not frozen?

[Crankin]

You mean fresh veggies that are canned and frozen, or the frozen packages?
If I grew my own, I guess I would can and freeze. But, I can't stand the frozen veggies you buy at the store.
I guess I'm spoiled.

[lph]

We tend to eat a mix. We have bags of frozen vegetables in the freezer, they're not like fresh but I'm told the the nutritional value is pretty good actually. They're easy to put into stews and stuff like that. I prefer fresh, but they're more hassle and time to prepare, keep for shorter time, and then there's the environmental impact. We stock up on local in-season vegetables when possible, but the season is short. There's absolutely nothing like fresh local ears of corn in september. Only canned corn available for the rest of the year.

It can be hard to know how to shop groceries sustainably. Apparently the carbon footprint of greenhouse-grown vegetables up here can rival that of air-transported stuff. I try to find a reasonable balance between a varied and healthy and enjoyable diet, and one that isn't based on an outrageous use of natural resources. The biggie when it comes to carbon footprint is of course reducing meat intake, from farmed animals.

I'm curious as to how gardening came into the discussion. There's no way I could garden more than a tiny fraction of the food I eat, not without giving up either my job or most of my free time in the growth season. I have friends who have small vegetable gardens, but it's mostly for fun. Even family who own a dairy farm and have plenty of land only produce their own potatoes.

[OakLeaf]

Heh. See, sweet corn is the one thing I won't even eat if I didn't grow it myself. The sugars start to convert to starches within 90 minutes of picking. Even at the farmers' market, sweet corn picked earlier the same day just tastes like cardboard to me.

I'm breakfasting right now on frozen blueberries I picked this July (at a farm, I don't have bushes of my own).

Of course I know that any home food preservation - freezing, canning, drying in non-arid climates - has substantial energy costs. There, far more than in transportation IMO, is where economies of scale really come into play. But I wasn't talking about personal choices ...

[Catrin]

I LOVE blueberries, but for some reason I just don't care for frozen. To me they taste like cardboard...I do need to get more berries in my diet. It is interesting to see how this discussion has morphed, and I am enjoying the different perspectives.

[lph]

Of course I know that any home food preservation - freezing, canning, drying in non-arid climates - has substantial energy costs. There, far more than in transportation IMO, is where economies of scale really come into play. But I wasn't talking about personal choices ...

Oh, I know :-) It's just interesting to discuss. Because even with stiffer prices for overseas vegetables and fruit, they're still affordable here, especially compared to meat - which is locally produced, and highly subsidized to keep the rural districts alive. But then, I don't live in the high Arctic.