Our family loves food. Not just eating it, but cooking it, growing it, learning where it comes from, if it’s in season, and how it helps (or harms) our bodies. My husband and I, who have had a long love affair with both each other as well as with food, were blessed with a like-minded child, Jackson our 10-year-old son. Jackson is rarely fussy and always adventurous when it comes to eating. So when we won the adult and child registrations to the New Orleans Eat Local Challenge from Macaroni Kid, we jumped in mouth first, excited to learn about what foods are available to us that are grown, raised, caught, or produced within a 200-mile radius of New Orleans.
The Eat Local Challenge happens every June in New Orleans to raise awareness of our local food system as well as showcase the abundance of foods indigenous to our area. Additionally, it is hosted in an effort to bolster our local economy by encouraging “locavores,” people who eat a locally-focused diet, to shop farmers markets and businesses that carry and sometimes specialize in local products, thereby benefitting local farmers, fishermen, and artisans. Our family makes groceries at the Hollygrove Market and Farm weekly for vegetables and sometimes eggs, but the majority of our food comes from the grocery store. I knew eating a local diet would likely be challenging for us. It is, after all, called the Eat Local Challenge.
When we picked up our registration packets at the Crescent City Farmers Market, a market brimming with local and in-season produce, seafood, baked items, juice, and even plants so you can grow your own food, I was full of questions about where to find local items. Turns out there are lots of options. Rouses supermarkets carry locally produced grits, cornmeal, rice, honey, cane syrup, meat, and in-season produce like tomatoes and berries, plus so much more. Cleaver and Company, a butcher on Baronne Street in the Uptown neighborhood, specializes in locally-raised meats like beef, pork, duck, chicken, and goat. And Good Eggs is an online farmers’ market where one can browse and order produce, meat, dairy products, and myriad other goods produced locally. Still, we signed up at the Challenge’s “lenient” level so that we could enjoy a few items not from our area, like olive oil, black pepper, and cherries (which are Jackson’s favorite and just coming into season, but not grown around here).
Eating locally forced us to get creative with what was available. I found I was making substitutions in recipes to keep them local. Some were easy, like subbing green beans for asparagus and locally grown rice for Arborio rice in risotto. Some were a leap, like subbing cane syrup, cane vinegar, local salt, and a splash of Old New Orleans rum (did you know we have a few rum distilleries here and that they make the rum from locally grown sugar cane?) for Worcestershire sauce. In many cases, I skipped recipes altogether and just got creative with what we had. Not using a recipe is far outside my normal comfort zone, but I did it and gained confidence in my ability to improvise on a whim. Plus, with Jackson helping, he gained a new-found interest in food preparation. He happily became my cooking partner, and I saw his confidence soar this month as well.
Along the way, there were challenges, successes, and surprises. Some challenges, aside from learning where to shop and how to cook without a recipe, included cost and variety to some extent. Locally grown grits and farm-raised chicken eggs are more expensive than their mass produced counterparts; however, we found the flavor (oh, those farmed-raised eggs are so delicious!) and benefit to local growers worth the extra expense. And as for variety, fruit was a challenge. Blueberries were abundant and the one fruit Jackson doesn’t like. Fortunately, cantaloupes and peaches became available by the third week of June.
As for successes, there were many! Jackson and I were able to attend numerous fun events. From discovering farmers markets and small urban farms, to learning how to make our own homemade cheese and to raise chickens, we were pleasantly busy and had meaningful mother/son bonding time. Jackson and I had fun reminiscing about workshops we attended and recreating in our own kitchen an amazing crepe we ate at one of the many restaurants that participate in the Challenge as well.
Admittedly, surprises outnumbered both challenges and successes. Dragonflies are edible, easy to catch, and once battered, fried, and sauced up, delicious! Surprised? Me too. Also, eating so many whole, unprocessed foods meant less packaging waste. I was surprised at how little garbage we generated weekly. Another surprise—did you know you can buy locally grown popcorn? We found it at Hollygrove Market and Farm, and it’s so much better than any you buy at the grocery store! One not-so-pleasant surprise was learning that raccoon and nutria are both edible. Edible, but not necessarily tasty—no surprise there, I guess. I have to say, though, the biggest, best surprise was when Jackson said one evening after dinner, “I feel so good!” Music to a mother’s ears, and I can only attribute it to our very healthy locavore diet. We were, after all, eating a lot of veggies and virtually no processed foods.
The month has been so much fun with new learning opportunities, challenges to overcome, and successes to grow our palates on that we’ve decided to stick with it beyond the month of June as much as we can. We intend to continue to eat locally and see what we learn. I know we’ve only just scratched the surface on eating and shopping locally. If the coming months are anything like June has been, I believe our whole family will end up more knowledgeable and healthier. We are already looking forward to upcoming seasonal produce (muscadine grapes and okra in the summer; citrus fruits, root veggies, and leafy greens in the winter). Plus, now that I have a new, excited 10-year-old partner in the kitchen, I just may get rid of all my recipes and try oven-roasting a nutria of our own. Probably not that, though.
