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Sourcing Food Ingredients Today
Debra Redalia
These are the actual strawberries we buy every week from the farmer’s market, as long as they are available. They are ripe and sweet—just picked. Supermarket strawberries don’t come close to these beauties.
This may be the most important post you read on this blog—where to obtain wholefood ingredients.
We shop in a variety of places.
First, if we can eat from our garden, we eat from our garden. All last summer I grew lettuce and tomatoes and herbs and had a salad from my garden every day for lunch. This year we are doubling the size of our vegetable garden and will learn how to grow autumn and winter crops in addition to our summer favorites. We also need to learn how much food we need to actually feed ourselves as much as we can, and learn how to do that.
Second, we go to two farmer’s markets—one just downtown where we live and another in Santa Rosa, our nearby “big city.” Each has different farmers, so we get more variety, and it’s only about a 20 minute drive. One on Saturday and one on Sunday. Saturday is the beginning of our food shopping week, so we buy from the two farm markets first and then brick-and-mortar markets.
But we also buy directly from organic farmers, both locally and by mail. We have a program here called Sonoma Farm Trails that lists the farms in the county and provides maps that tell when their farm stands are open. A couple of times a year they have open farm weekends where more farms are open. One of our favorites is Bohemian Creamery which raises goats and makes cheese. They are open every weekend and on many Saturday mornings, we stop there for goat milk frozen yogurt that is a different flavor every week. I love this place. Their cheeses are on the cheese plates of top San Francisco restaurants, and we just go buy it right from the source.
Then almost daily we go to a produce stand down the street, so close we can ride there on our tandem bike. They have fresh organic and non-organic produce every day, plus packaged natural and organic foods. The difference between Andy’s Produce and a natural food store is they are family-oned and have been in business for more than 50 years, so they have a lot of connections in the community. The food is more local, delivered to the store more immediately, and costs less. And every morning they take the “day-old” produce out of the bins and put it on the discount cart at about half-price or less. So if you go early enough, you can get gourmet mushrooms for $2-3 a pound. We never pay full price for mushrooms and we’re buying trumpets and hen-of-the-woods. We forage Andy’s discount cart as if it were a forest, It’s our “local environment.” And they have the best organic coffee. It’s a great way to start the day.
If we still need something, we go to Pacific Market, which is an independently-owned grocery that’s been here for more than 70 years. This is the “gourmet” market where they sell specialty foods like free-range chicken, grass-fed beef and pork; local farmed oysters and line caught salmon; house-made sausages; and tumbled, marinated meat. They make fresh sushi right before your eyes and things like that. When the local Dungeness crab are in season, they “fire up the only authentic crab pots still in use north of San Francisco.” Again, it’s right down the street (in the opposite direction from Andy’s). Because the prices are higher we only buy things we really like that we can’t get other places, like fermented greek olives and heirloom dried beans.
Our local supermarket is Safeway. They actually sell a lot of organic produce and have their own brand of prepared organic foods at supermarket prices. We buy roasted garlic organic pasta sauce there and they will occasionally have things like shelled heirloom walnuts and pecans.
We also have two natural food stores downtown, which I’m sure I will write about in a separate blog. They are as different as night and day. One is amazon-owned Whole Foods and the other is employee-owned. I don’t even want to get started writing about this here. More to come in a separate post soon.
So that’s where we buy our food, for the most part. If we’re driving around in a new place, we’ll often stop and see what food is available, and often buy some to bring home.
I think I live in food paradise.
Where to Find Food During the Covid-19 Pandemic
After about six weeks of covid-19 pandemic confusion, just sourcing food at all has become more and more difficult and may become more difficult still.
I just heard on the news, for example, that a shortage of meat is anticipated starting this weekend because of the shutdown of meatpacking facilities due to the spread of the coronavirus.
The whole food supply chain is a mess at the moment, so who knows what food will be available from day to day or week to week.
So I want to tell you what to do for more food security.
Right now start becoming aware of what food you can buy locally.
First, find your local farmer’s market.
See if you have a Community Supported Agriculture program nearby, where you purchase shares in the farmer’s harvest and get a box or basket of whatever the harvest is every week.
And start planting a garden if you don’t already have one. Larry and i usually have some kind of summer garden, but this year, we are doubling the size and his sister is planting the biggest garden she has ever had.
When you see on the news that there are problems with the food supply, what they are talking about is food grown on industrial farms for the commercial food market, not the food for the consumer market.
Summer is coming. Learn to can and store food for winter.
Right now it’s just all uncertain, so the more you know about where to buy locally-grown food the better.
But even if the food supply was totally stable, it’s best to grow as much food as you can so you can eat it “the shortest distance from plant to mouth.”
And it’s always best to eat foods grown in your local ecosystem. That’s the way Nature designed it: earth—plants—animals—humans. All in one place.
I live in an area with a lot of farms and some people have gardens. Ironically, as we drive on the local country roads, we see that most people do not have gardens other than a few flowers and shrubs. At the nurseries, I see mostly younger people buying food plants and all the older ones except me seem to be buying decorative stuff. A good deal of the older population, the ones that used to pass on such knowledge, are not doing so. If people live in a huge city, I understand that but why are rural and small-town people not growing food gardens? My mother lived through the Great Depression and WWII and though she wasn’t a gardener, she did pass on some of the frugality and reuse ethic of her generation.
I hate to say it, but I think many Americans are so spoon fed that they haven’t the foggiest idea of how to react to shortages,etc..
I may not be able to plant the rest of my garden this week. Not only are buckets more rain forecast, we may have a freak early May frost!
As to meat consumption: I was a lacto-ovo vegetarian for seven years; although I am not now a vegetarian, I can certainly eat eggs, tofu and beans in lieu of meat for a few weeks if I have to. Some people have no idea how to cook a main meal without meat. I know-how. There are tons of recipes available on the Internet and many cookbooks that feature veg food. There is a country store that sells dried beans by the bagful near here and several stores sell tofu. So I’ll be okay.
I am more concerned about the nursing homes in VA, which seem to be the main sources of CV-19 and deaths in VA. They need to clean them up. If we and want to protect our old folks as much as we claim these days, we need to stop warehousing them in deathtrap nursing homes.
One of the reasons so many people are vulnerable in the 1st place is not age but the co-morbid conditions that afflict so many Americans of all ages. Many of those conditions are avoidable or can be reduced or eliminated with proper diet, exercise, fresh air and sunshine and certainly by not smoking. On 60 Minutes, a rural doctor mentioned many of her patients having 10-20 co-morbid conditions and illnesses. That is insane when you think about it,
I think that people are not growing food gardens because it is “out of fashion” and because industrial food has been inexpensive. Growing food gardens is no longer something people do with family and friends and neighbors. Nor is it considered to be essential to survival. It’s missing in our culture.
I totally agree with you that Americans are so spoon fed by industrial consumerism that most haven’t a clue what to do when there are shortages. Many are missing essential survival skills like growing food or cooking.
The weather is very odd here too this year, but we planted our garden over the weekend. I’m sure you’ll get yours in too.
Agree nursing homes need to be cleaned up everywhere.
Yes so many co-morbid conditions is insane. For those of you unfamiliar with this term, co-morbidity is more than one medical condition existing simultaneously with and usually independently of another medical condition. I think it’s highly likely those who are dying from covid-19 have multiple conditions and covid-19 is just the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
In many areas, both garden centers (for plants, seeds,etc.) and farmer’s markets are closed. I know someone in Maryland who had a terrible time getting garden plants because they closed garden centers and sealed borders at the Eastern Shore, This person does not have home internet access and the libraries are closed, so he can’t order online.
Our garden centers are open in VA but in my mountain valley area, full spring production has not yet begun.
We had two very late frosts in mid and late April (after a warmer than normal February and March) and drenching rains twice or more a week, as well as very high winds on many occasions. That has set back our planting quite a bit. I still have plants bought at one of our two wonderful local nurseries (not officially organic but grown without chemicals. Smaller local nurseries find the rules and regulations of becoming organic too time-consuming and costly).
We can get eggs from local people who keep backyard chickens and meat from country stores who sell locally produced ground beef,etc. But most of the time we either go to Food Lion or Aldi and occasionally Fresh Market because cost and access are a big factor in our shopping. We are not near a whole Foods, the nearest Earth Fare costs the earth and is 35 miles away and our tiny local independent health food store stocks mostly canned and boxed stuff. I tried to ask the manager about the meat and vegetables they do carry but they were too busy yakking with a couple of regulars that hang out there to bother answering my query, so after 10 minutes of trying, I left.
I understand.
This is what happens when we rely on industrial food supply.
I realize that I live in an unusual place where we have farms and gardens. We’re planting our garden this weekend.
But it’s difficult even here.
We went shopping for seedlings over the weekend to our usual nurseries. They were open, but we had to wait in line at both nurseries and they were in short supply.
Our farmer’s markets have stayed open—thank goodness—and we bought seedlings there yesterday and will buy more today, but again, many people are buying them and there is not the usual supply.
What all this tells me is that we absolutely need to establish secure local production of essential food. The industrial food supply is not reliable.
This week the big food issue is covid-19 outbreaks in meat-packing plants. Meat is now in short supply and prices are going up. Personally I think all the meat packing plants should be closed for two weeks and we should all stop eating meat for two weeks.
We’re in a time now where the old structure is collapsing and we need to build local food systems that are more reliable and suited to place.