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Making a feast of locally grown foods is easy if you know where to look.

Monday Dec 03, 2007.     By Sharon Hoyer

Lifestyle Feed

A little over a year ago, my friend Julia (the original Thumb) suggested I take advantage of my spacious pad by hosting a 100-mile Thanksgiving. "Nice thought," I said to myself, "but we don't have space for that many people." A few embarrassing moments later, I realized she was referring to the food, not the guests, and a project undertaken by Vancouverites Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon to only eat items gathered within said distance of their apartment for one year. Their book about the experience, The 100-Mile Diet, helped spread awareness of the positive impact of eating locally.

The average American meal is better traveled than the average American; most of our foods are shipped approximately 1,500 miles from field to plate (that's about Chicago to Boise). The touring time of our food consumes egregious amounts of gasoline and creates significant CO2 emissions. It can also be blamed for the annoying way Europeans like to accuse the American palate of being unable to distinguish between a cucumber and a cardboard box. Freshness, flavor, fossil fuels and small organic farms all suffer at the robotic arm of the food-industrial complex. However, the "locavore" movement is gaining momentum, particularly in urban areas, where enjoying the cultural riches of city life once meant subsisting on anonymous week-old produce.

This isn't to say I thought putting together a traditional 100-mile Thanksgiving feast would be easy. Most of the farmers markets had shut down for the winter, and the share of locally raised ingredients at major chains is dismally small. But I was wrong; it was a cinch.

About the same time Julia was planting the local food seed in my mind, Irv Cernauskas and Shelly Herman were creating a business to bring locally grown food to Chicagoans. Irv and Shelly's Fresh Picks is an online service, offering boxes of in-season produce—in the style of co-ops and CSAs—but also allowing customers to place customized orders for produce, dairy and meats for weekly home delivery. Now, a year later, business is booming; Irv and Shelly work with over 60 small farms, most within a day's drive of the city. And I, planning to stuff 18 people to the gills, was able to buy nearly everything I needed online and have it delivered to my door in reusable bins.

This green endeavor was the most pleasurable to date. Many of the efforts we make toward environmental preservation are performed in good faith. There's no tangible evidence of the greenhouse gases not produced by taking public transportation instead of driving a personal vehicle. But local food provides instant gratification. While I didn't personally meet the farmers who supplied the chickens, mushrooms, potatoes, squash, leeks, parsley, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, carrots, celery, butter and thyme for my dinner, I certainly would like to shake their collective hand. When the bounty arrived, spilling across every surface of my kitchen, it was like Santa stopped by a month early. There's absolutely no way to replicate the flavor of food picked 24 hours before you eat it. And the knowledge that my meal was encouraging local agriculture was just glaze on the bird. The feast was a flawless success. Everyone was properly overfed, even the vegans. And my friend who grew up on soul food liked my vegetarian stuffing so much, she asked for the recipe.

One question continually pops up when I talk about the meal: Is local food cheaper? Well, it depends. Most locally grown items are organic, so it's really only fair to compare costs with organic foods shipped from outside the Midwest. This week, organic onions grown in Mexico at Whole Foods cost $1.69 per pound. Local onions from Fresh Picks: $1.99 per pound. Some items are cheaper from local farms; right now, russet potatoes and apples are about $.40 less per pound from Fresh Picks, and head-to-head (sorry, couldn't resist), lettuce costs the same if you get it from California or Illinois.

I know, I know; this ain't exactly cheap. If you're used to shopping at Stanley's, it's downright exorbitant. However, the price—as Michael Pollan lucidly explicates in The Omnivore's Dilemma—is a more accurate reflection of the cost of responsible, sustainable agriculture. My roommates and I have put together a small standing order—a few items we cook with every week that we're willing to splurge on. While we can't afford to buy everything we eat from local farms (and we're not about to give up coffee and chocolate), we can take a little time and care in considering the origins of our food as well has how we prepare them.

Other ways to support your local farmer:

Visit the Newleaf Natural Grocery, offering exclusively organic ingredients and produce boxes year round.

Stop by the Green City Market, now inside the Notebaert Nature Museum for the winter.

Check localharvest.org for listings of farms, markets and restaurants nationwide featuring local fare.

It took a move from the regimented lawnscapes of the suburbs to the congestion of a major metropolis for Sharon to look twice at what she puts in the trash, down the sink and into her own body. She reports fortnightly on her endeavors to change "greening" from calculated deviation to a practicable way of life. You can contact her here.