A book report. Sort of. Or at least a start.

I don’t read books as much as I should. I probably read 10 books worth of material online every day. But I think I can count on my fingers how many books I’ve casually picked up and made it all the way through in the past 10 years. I should get better about that.

This evening, Anne & I were driving home from visiting relatives and she took her turn behind the wheel while I sat in back, fed Desi a bottle, and decided to start on a book she had picked up from the library called Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally. After Desi fell asleep I continued to read, and breezed through the first couple chapters.

The topic of eating locally is something that Anne & I have recently decided that we want to try to address a bit more… or at least become a bit more aware of. We do the vast majority of our grocery shopping at either Giant Eagle or Kroger. Our old apartment was walking distance from the German Village Giant Eagle, but we haven’t really made up our minds yet where to shop from our new house. There’s not much in walking distance aside from a few carryouts of the beer/cigarette/pop/lottery variety, and while we have a farmer’s market that comes to the Columbus Health Department location on Main Street, it only runs through the summer.

We have been customers of the North Market for many years, but we mostly stick to either prepared foods for lunch/dinner, or only make specialty trips for dinner party items. But we are starting to come to the conclusion that it’s time to make the jump into being more regular grocery customers there. We want to show our support for our local farmers, even if we can’t afford to do 100% of our shopping at the North Market. And we want to raise the quality of some of the items we consume when comparing to the selections at standard grocery stores.

To accomplish this, what we’ve decided to do is make a new Saturday-morning tradition out of going to the North Market with $20 in hand to invest in some food for the following week. We’ll probably stick mostly to produce that’s locally-grown and currently in season, but may opt for a few other items when we’re in the mood, such as a fancy cut of meet for a special occasion. I’ll try to document our progress with this experiment as we go, and hopefully will find it rewarding on multiple levels.

Oh, right… back to the book. (As I mentioned, I’ve only made it through the first few chapters, but I have every intention on finishing it.)

The authors were inspired by a living-off-the-wilderness meal to attempt to eat locally (with 100 miles of home) for an entire year. The book is a documentation of their process, but also provides some of their research on the concepts of farmer’s markets in the US, the sustainability of a global food system, and the impact on the environment that all of this has. I enjoy that the authors are not out to be total extremists (which is always a turn off for me with any sort of concept) but are simply seeking to research as deeply into the topic to the best of their abilities. The provide a lot of good insight on some of the things that I think most people take for granted when they shop for groceries, and there’s a bit of humor injected to boot.

I felt pretty inspired so far by what they had to say, and while I’m not going to attempt a similar challenge myself (there are foods that I love too much that aren’t grown in Central Ohio) I do want to establish better relationships and connections with the things that I put into my body on a daily basis.

I’ll post a bit more on this once I finish the book and start out the Market challenge next weekend. Anyone else interested in doing something like this with us?