Looking back on eating local part 2: a book review

Our first movement into becoming "locavores" was to brush up on the philosophy and thinking of the movement. Growing up in mostly rural areas, Caleb was used to the idea of finding the local farm stand and/or natural foods stores to do the majority of important shopping. Living in the city had turned us from what would have been a natural habit: eating local into the average suburban eater--no clear direction, buy what's on sale, don't pay attention to origin or season. We knew the shift back to thinking about localized food sources would be harder than just putting "local" in front of everything on our shopping list. Why were these things so important? What was so wrong with eating strawberries from California, tomatoes from Mexico, and corn from God-knows-where as long as we did the shopping at the local grocery store chain?

For inspiration and motivation we turned to Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, published by Penguin. This book has been life changing for our family; here are a few of the reasons why:

Pollan's premise is simple: Eat food; not too much; mostly vegetables. It seems simple, but once you start to unpack each of those things, you begin to see how difficult the solution to the problem has become over the last seventy years. With the advent of nutritionism, eating food has been harder and harder for the average person. Food science has taken hold of our national consciousness, and you can't even go to the grocery store without being bombarded by messages from the shelves about the supposed health benefits of the products contained.

We found this book to be incredibly challenging and exciting as we worked our way through it. Since that time, we have been more aware of the things we are spending (or not spending) our money on. We joined our winter CSA as a way to eat better and ensure that we got our money's worth on food in a way that we never were able to when we were making things up as we go along. It's done wonders for our health, quality of life, and budget.