Lessons Learned

Happy Easter (a couple of days late)! I think I should make an entry here about what we've learned over the past 40 days. What we'll keep from this experience, what we'll ditch.

I had to start thinking about this a couple of days ago when I was starting my shopping list. I usually shop for the week on Sunday afternoon but over the past 40 days I've been doing the majority of my shopping on Saturdays because that's when the farmer's market is held. And I've done two weeks worth of produce shopping on Saturdays because in the winter the farmer's market only occurs every other weekend. But this weekend I knew that with the end of Lent, we didn't have to stick around for the market. We could get far-flung produce any day of the week. We took advantage of that to go up to the mountains to snowboard on Saturday. Ah, the freedom that global eating has afforded us...

But I still had to plan for meals for the week. So what goes on the list? I started listing the things we've missed: cinnamon, tortillas, soy milk, bran flakes, raisins...and then the list started to look just exactly like my shopping list before Lent and I became a little disappointed in myself. What's the point if we just go back to exactly the same habits and patterns we had before? After some discussion we decided to try to balance things a little better. Charlie said he could live without the bran flakes and raisins (local oats with frozen blueberries for breakfast) if we could get some commercially made tortillas. I thought I could keep with the oats too, and maybe use some cinnamon and brown sugar (which I've really missed). So we worked it out like that. Some of this from local sources, and a little of that from far away. And of the far away things, we're trying to get them as close to our house as possible. Some produce from California, tortillas made in Oregon, olive oil from Napa Valley instead of from Italy.

One of the most valuable things I've learned is that there are local sources (or local-ish sources) for many of the things we used to get from wherever. We can get walnuts and flax from a farm within 10 miles of our door instead of from California, and we can get spinach from California instead of from New Mexico, and we can get peanut butter from New Mexico instead of from Georgia. Stuff like that. So we'll do the best we can taking these things into account.

Thanks to those of you who have followed this blog. It's been an important part of our efforts. And many many thanks to those of you who have given food from freezers and cupboards and herb pots. This has truly been a community effort!

Love and good thoughts,
Kim, Charlie, and Luke