Grocery Angst

I so enjoyed reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  The passion and wit with which she writes, her zeal for gardening and her fervor for home cooking were a joy to experience.  

She wove much humor into her book with comments such as, “knowing how foods grow is to know how and when to look for them; such expertise is useful for certain kinds of people, namely, the ones who eat.”

And I was certain I'd found a soulmate when she wrote, "looking at all these jars in the pantry gave me a happy, connected feeling, as if I had roots growing right through the soles of my shoes into the dirt of our farm.”

For all the delight of reading Animal, however, the author has caused me to have a mild case of grocery shopping angst.  One of the main premises of her book, and the experiment her family took part in for one year, is to eat locally, buying, storing and preserving foods grown and harvested within a county or two of home.  And I appreciate her point about the inefficiency and waste of using massive amounts of fuel and energy to ship a few calories worth of produce from South America to the midwest.  Eating locally is a lovely idea.

But I just couldn't bring myself to completely jump on the bandwagon, mainly because WE LIVE IN NORTH DAKOTA!  Granted Kingsolver doesn't live in a tropical garden paradise either, but to eat truly locally means the only fruits we could consume are berries and apples.  The rare plum and pear tree survive in our severe climate, but neither are typically a ND-hardy crop.

However, despite persisting in purchasing bananas, grapefruit and oranges from wonderfully more temperate climates (and feeling maybe only a tad guilty about contributing to such superfluous fuel consumption), I am renewed in my quest to frequent our town's weekly farmers' market and to try to grow and preserve even more of our family's food right here at home.  Well, at least I'll do those things in a couple more months when the snow melts and the ground thaws.  In the meantime, bring on the pineapple.