Imagine if you could get your family dinners for the week cooked on Sunday afternoon and share the shopping, prep time and clean-up with your girlfriends. Our Book Club Moms did it, and it has made for a number of relaxing nights this week in our kitchens!

Getting Ready

After discussing food allergies and preferences, we each selected one of our family favorite recipes and purchased the ingredients for all six participants. We also communicated what kids of pans were needed to transport/cook the meals (e.g. my Turkey Meatloaf required a loaf pan). The hostess provided vegetable oil, olive oil, dried spices, and cooking utensils. Not knowing how long it would take, we gave ourselves 3 hours. Our respective husbands were thrilled to be left home to watch football, while our kids played and wandered in the kitchen to help/snack.

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Part One: What IS a locavore?

A locavore is a person who seeks out locally produced food. There are differing intensities of locavores, including those who grow their own food, those who only eat seasonally grown fruits and vegetables or those, like me, who make an effort to purchase foods from within a 100 mile radius of my home when I can.

Why eat locally, you ask?

According to locavore.org, “our food now travels an average of 1,500 miles before ending up on our plates. Because uncounted costs of this long distance journey (air pollution and global warming, the ecological costs of large scale monoculture, the loss of family farms and local community dollars) are not paid for at the checkout counter, many of us do not think about them at all”. Moving towards local food sources has many benefits, including providing us with a “connection and responsibility to a particular locality”, and helping us to understand about the “foodshed” that we live in.

How do you start?

According to an eco-friendly website called simple-green-frugal.blogspot.com, finding resources “is, by far, the most difficult part of being a locavore. The good news is that once you identify your sources, being a locavore is almost as easy as shopping at those big-box stores. Except now, your food will taste better, it will be more nutritionally-dense, and you’ll be helping the environment and your community in the process”. As you expand your cooking ability, you will be able to incorporate more local food sources into your favorite recipes.

But how is it thrifty?

Consuming high-quality, nutrient dense foods is definitely a good choice for frugal families. When you shop at the big box markets, much of what you get is low in nutrients, high in calories and less than satisfying to your hunger. Serving slices of local artisan bread with local butter, on the other hand, will fill up your family with high quality calories and help the environment in the meantime.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, as we do, we have a short list of our favorite companies that we like to buy from. Here are a few:

Cowgirl Creamery
Straus Organic Yogurt
Organic Valley
Point Reyes Farmstead Original Blue Cheese
Willie Bird Turkeys
Beckmann’s Old World Bakery, Santa Cruz, CA.

Wherever you live, there is a lot of information on the internet from the locavore communities regarding eating locally. To find information about your geographic area, Google the word “locavore” and the name of your city, region or state and see if you can find some helpful links. Here are a few sample websites we liked from around the country:

Chicago – http://www.thelocalbeet.com/local-eating-links/
New York City – http://www.localfork.com/locavoreguidenyc.aspx
New Hampshire and Vermont – http://uvlocalvore.com/

Good luck becoming a locavore!

Darcy Ratner
Co-founder, Rubbingnickels.com

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