Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
It was my chariot before I got my driver’s license at 16. My Murray Red Flyer, with the 26-inch wheels, took me all over the Fairfield neighborhood as a fourth and fifth grader. In junior high, there weren’t many places on the vast Mather Air Force Base that I couldn’t go with a little leg power and the Red Flyer.
On one of my sojourns around the Northern California base, I spotted an apple tree. It was in the junior officer’s section of the base. I went up to the door of a captain’s house, and his nice wife answered.
“Could I pick some of those apples off your tree?” I asked. “My mom said she’d make me an apple pie if I found some.”
Graciously, she said, “Take all you want.”
I rode home, came back with a burlap bag and loaded up. They were bright red, a little tart, and filled with worm holes, but I didn’t care. I peeled them, cut out the wormy sections, and had enough apples not for one, but two pies.
In my distant memory, they were fabulous.
We live in a strange era. Our food supply is contaminated with chemicals, pesticides, preservatives, and every sort of strange concoction that food scientists can think of to prolong shelf life, quicken ripening, remove blemishes, and kill insects.
It’s only going to get worse as the regulations that protect our food supply have been chopped away over the last seven months. Apples, oranges, and bananas brought to you by Dupont and DOW Chemical. What could be better?
My friend Jack Schmidt has served as the poster child for the local food movement. There is great merit in his cause.
Growing locally produced meat, vegetables, and fruit makes sense. It cuts down on transportation costs, it’s better for you, and it supports our community.
We take pride in raising our own beef, but take equal pride in the garden-fresh tomatoes I pick every morning, the potatoes, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and broccoli we harvest, and the eggs we get from our neighbors.
Have you ever noticed the difference between a store egg and one laid by a local, free-range hen? There is no comparison. The store eggs have pale yellow yolks, not much flavor, and fall in comparison to the bright orange zesty flavor of an egg from a leghorn or Rhode Island Red that clears the garden of grasshoppers, snags a stray mouse or earthworm, and feeds on whole corn or a mixed oats and alfalfa concoction.
Last week I had a ribeye from one of our steers, with some steamed broccoli freshly picked from the garden. Immaculate eating. We try to have a couple of dozen meals each year that are all raised by us.
Tomatoes, with just a dash of salt and pepper are regular fare from the end of July to late September. Maybe longer this year since my hydroponic system is cranking out Big Boys and Early Girls at an epic pace. When the first threat of frost is forecast, we drain the system, carry it downstairs to the daylight basement, refill it, and get another month or two of tomatoes. Last year, I picked the last one around the first of December.
It’s almost like living in a temperate climate.
When I taught high school geography, I had a “Mom’s Kitchen” assignment. The kids had to pick 20 items from their mom’s spice cabinet, pantry, or freezer and write down where it was produced. When they all had their lists, I took a big map of the world (You remember those rolled-up, pull-down maps). Each kid got a sticky note, wrote down the 20 items he or she found at home, and soon the map was filled with stickers.
Most of those stickers covered South America, the Pacific Islands, India, China, and Southeast Asia. There were a handful from California, a few from the Northeast, and a handful from the American South, but most of the food came across the ocean from another nation.
It was a powerful lesson for the students.
Since I’ve always taught in rural Wyoming schools, there was no need to ask where their families bought their meat. They didn’t buy it. They raised hogs, cattle, and a few sheep. Most of them had a steady diet of wild game as well.
The modern trend of “eating healthy” flies in the face of industrial fast food. You can buy a gut bomb burger for a dollar or two, but a small salad sells for $5 or more. It doesn’t make sense.
When Sue and I shop, we try to buy everything on the perimeter of the grocery store.
If you think about the outside area of grocery stores, they’re all nearly identical. Produce, milk, cheese, bread, meat, and fish are always on the perimeter of a store.
In the center aisles, you find canned goods, processed food, potato chips, soda pop, candy, and other gems that arrive from a factory floor a long way from home.
We can’t buy everything we need locally. We sure can’t raise it all ourselves, but there has to be a happy medium.
Locally sourced, locally grown, locally processed, without long-range shipping, is usually more expensive than the same things made in a factory farm, huge truck farm, or vast California or Florida orchard. But what is the cost in the long run?
The allergies that didn’t exist a generation or two ago now plague children and young adults at unprecedented levels. Is there a connection between artificial ingredients, processing chemicals, and the other multi-syllabic items listed on the label and this sudden surge in allergies?
I count trout, walleye filets, antelope, deer, and elk as locally sourced foods. They’re perhaps healthier than the beef that grazes outside the yard in the pasture.
Yes, it’s cheaper at the big box stores. The flavor of fast food is engineered to be addictive, and addiction is hard to break.
Tim McGraw shared this sentiment in his 1997 hit, “Where the Green Grass Grows.”
Another supper from a sack
A 99-cent heart attack
I’ve got a pounding head and an achin’ back
And the camels buried in the big straw stack
… I’m gonna live where the green grass grows
Watch my corn pop up in rows
Every night be tucked in close to you
Those carefully protected tomatoes in the garden, that sweet corn from a local farmer, the half-side of beef you bought from a local rancher, are not only healthier, but they’re also healthier for the local economy as well.
We have a few apples that I’d like to take to mom, but she’s gone to a better place.