An Apple Grows in Long Beach; or Local is as Local Does

It's Sunday, February 23rd. I am exactly six posts behind. What happened? Three words. Mercury. In. Retrograde. If you are not hippy dippy trippy, you might have heard that Mercury was in retrograde as you browsed your horoscope on your iPhone and disregarded it the way I do when I hear any news story that begins with the letters DOW. So here's the Reader's Digest explanation. The mechanical details of our lives are influenced not only by the position of our planet in the solar system, but the position of other planets as well. Ever woken up on or around your 29th birthday and realized that your life didn't look anything like you thought it would? Or it did, and you were completely miserable anyway? Most likely you were in the midst of a Saturn return. Every 29 years, Saturn returns to the position it was in when you were born and throws your life into complete chaos. Total f-ing mayhem (for more information, see Lola Versus. It's my fave Greta Gerwig joint.). But I digress.

I'm gonna call you Dandelion.

Mercury is in retrograde 3-4 times every year for roughly three weeks a turn. When Mercury is in retrograde, it appears to be travelling backward in the sky. Something to do with its position to the earth and the sun, blah, blah, blah. Since Mercury is thought to effect communication, mental clarity, truth, travel, and interestingly, writing, Mercury traveling backward (or appearing to, anyway), throws all of those things into a tailspin. If over the last three weeks, you have felt generally tangled, tongue-tied, uninspired, argumentative or stuck, you have felt the side effects of Mercury in retrograde. So what I have been doing during this period of general emotional malaise? Aside from a spirited argument with my Dad that my eternal fate is to be the Gayle to someone else's Oprah, a whole lot of nothing. Okay. I've been binge watching Orange is the New Black and losing horrifically in WordFeud. That's what I've been doing. Mercury in retrograde is also supposed to be the perfect opportunity to slow down, recharge, and reconnect to a spiritual source. Exactly none of those things happened for me, but maybe they happened for you during the last three weeks. In which case, high five! Good for you! Lucky for me, Mercury comes out of retrograde on Friday, February 28th. And I know that the fog is lifting because I woke up this morning and wanted to knit. I know, my brain is like a bad DJ (again, see Lola Versus). So here is my three-week summary of Month 2, my month as a locavore.    

Vision Board Mandate: Eat Whole Foods
--not to be confused with Eat at Whole Foods

"Dad," I announced to my roommate on February 1st, "We're doing something different in February. . . we're becoming locavores."

"Local whores? Kam, why the hell are we doing that?!"

"Um. No. LocaVores. Like herbiVores. Or carniVores. It means that we're going to be eating locally all month. Local whoring might be more lucrative, but that's not what we're doing."

"I eat here almost every night," he said. "It doesn't get anymore local than that!"

"Local eating is about where our food comes from. Not where it's cooked."

"My food comes from the Trader Joe's on Bellflower."

Sigh.

So what is a locavore and why am I forcing my roommate into becoming one? A locavore, or someone who belongs to a local food movement, is someone who has made a commitment to eating foods that are grown or produced within a certain distance from the eater's residence. In general, it means not eating tomatoes from Ecuador. (Pro Tip: when you are talking about joining the local food movement to your friends and neighbors, either really enunciate the "V" in "vore," or use the term "local food movement." Otherwise, your friends might think you are becoming a sex worker. Or you can use my dad's term "living la vida local." Good luck with that.)

So why live la vida local? Perhaps you would like to lessen your carbon footprint. Maybe you are concerned about GMOs, and want to know more about where your food comes from. Possibly you would rather see your hard-earned money going to a farmer in your area than lining the pockets of a Monsanto executive. All perfectly good reasons to become a local foodist. Here's why I was local food-curious: I don't know a lot about farm bills, or agricultural policies, or why, if GMOs are not harmful, companies like Monsanto would throw so much money into fighting GMO-labeling bills. What I do know is that I live in a world that is growing increasingly toxic. And I while I know (and begrudgingly accept) that we will never know why most young, otherwise healthy, people get sick, I can't help but wonder what role the typical American food supply plays in our overall health and longevity. It's hard enough trying to eat an apple instead of the heavily-marketed Snickers bar. I don't want to wonder if the GMO-spawned, pesticide-covered Granny Smith I am putting into my mouth is just as likely to make me sick as all of those heavenly layers of milk chocolate, caramel, and nougat. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Anyway, here's what we're doing and how we're doing it:

Inside the Mystery Box

Step 1: Join a CSA. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. If CSA is too difficult for you to remember, do what my dad does, and call it the mystery box. Seriously. Some CSA's are delivery services, others deliver your subscription to a certain location on a certain day and you have to pick it up. Read the fine print. We subscribed to Beachgreens, which is local to Long Beach, Seal Beach, and parts of Sunset Beach. After discovering that we weren't making it through all of the parsnip in the half fruit, half vegetable original box every week, we downsized to the mostly vegetable studio box, and found that it fits this Goldilocks just right. The Beachgreens Studio Box is $29.99 per week, and this week we received two heads of lettuce, beets, carrots, parsnips, Italian parsley, Swiss chard, kale, about two pounds of oranges and a pound of kiwi.

Step 2: Supplement your CSA with Farmers Market finds. The timing of our CSA delivery every week really couldn't be better. Our mystery box is delivered to our doorstep every Friday afternoon. We take inventory of our local veggie booty on Friday night (exciting, I know. Don't be jealous.) and make a list of anything else we need for the week. Any fruit, vegetables, cheese, fish, bread, nut butters, or herbs that we need for the next week, we pick up at the Southeast Long Beach Farmers Market on Sunday. We spend, on average, about $40 at the Farmers Market every week (Note: my dad LOVES buying wild Alaskan king salmon from the Fish Guy. At $21 per pound, this makes up about half of our farmers market total).

Step 3: Buy any remaining items that you absolutely must have at the grocery store. For us this includes coffee, cream, baking items like flour, baking powder, and yeast, and wine and beer, mostly. For my dad this also includes bananas. Every week he asks if I have seen bananas at the farmers market. Every week I tell him no, because I go to the farmer's market in Long Beach, California, and not the farmers market in Antigua. Bananas grow in tropical climes, which means they are never going to be local. But I would rather he buy his bananas at the grocery store and stay on our local parsnip and cabbage diet than have him completely veer off course and start buying cucumbers from Guatemala again, so I let that go. We spend, on average, about $25 at the grocery store each week.  

Here's how it's gone, so far:
Week 1:
Dad: "How am I supposed to plan what to make every week if I don't know what's going to be in our mystery box?!"
Me: "Look in the box first, and then plan your menu for the week. You're on an adventure. This is how the pilgrims did it."
Dad: "I don't think the pilgrims got mystery boxes."
Me: Sigh.

Week 2:
Dad: "This is how I like to cook; quality ingredients made with minimal preparation. And look, I cooked fennel!"

Local Lilies

Week 3:
Me: "Did you try the honey? It's good, huh?"
Dad: "Yeah, that is really good honey."
Me: "It's from Inglewood."
Dad: "You mean it's inner city honey?"
Me: "Yeah, but I don't know if the bees were Bloods or Crips. That's not a problem for you, is it?"

Week 4:
Dad: "Guess what kind of pasta sauce this is?"
Me: "I dunno."
Dad: "It's PARSNIP sauce!"
Me. "Wow, Dad. Who knew you could make pasta sauce from parsnip?" (Aside: did I mention that we had to get REALLY creative with the parsnips?)
Dad: You know, I think this experiment has actually made me a better cook!"

And also, flowers. Every week, I look through the buckets of flowers the flower guy has at the farmer's market. Flower Guy now recognizes me and points out what he has that is new, and what plants are better quality with firmer buds and stronger stems. My roommate has not noticed the flowers once, but my days are now scented with French lilacs and white lilies.

My so here are my grades for the last threeish weeks: A solid B+. I can't give myself an A because I still eat most of my weekday lunches at the La Salsa a couple of blocks from my office, and I'm pretty sure that there are no black bean burrito trees in Orange County or its surrounds.  
Yoga: 8 classes in February so far. I'm kicking ass in the yoga challenge. If only they could all be this easy. . .