Make A Plan

I figure there are several steps I'm going to need to take in order to begin buying local foods for my family.

1. Determine which foods we cannot live without: milk, juice, bread, produce, meats, fruit snacks.
2. Educate myself about which produce is in season and grown nearby; I'm fairly certain the blueberries my kids wolfed down for breakfast this morning weren't dug out from under the foot and a half of snow that's currently on the ground outside.
   
3. Find out which store carries the majority of these items, is close by, and offers babysitting while you shop.

I began my search where I begin everything these days, on the internet. First, I went to a site I've referenced for other earth-friendly information, earth911.org, but they only had a search field for finding local recycling centers. Next I decided to broaden my efforts, so I Googled "local foods" and here are the surprising results:

• localharvest.org - This site listed several local farmstands and stores near me, however all of the listings were 7 years out of date.
• http://www.mass.gov/agr/massgrown/ - This site has good information on where you can find local foods in Massachusetts, however if you try to find out what's in season all you get is a graph that shows local foods in season from June to October. It's fuzzy at best and fairly useless considering it's now January.
• www.foodroutes.org - This site, which has information on where your food comes from and challenges you to by locally sounded promising, was easy to navigate, insisted that even living in the Northeast I could find local food in the winter, and had a convenient link that I'm sure would have shown me just where those places were, but... It was broken. Moving on.
  
• www.nrdc.org - On this site I finally found a very clear table showing which foods are in season, but it also said the following concerning finding fresh produce now: "No fresh, local produce available in Massachusetts at this time." It looks like Mass. only has fresh produce from June to October. Apparently my blueberries aren't the only produce that is not dug out from under the foot and a half of snow and delivered to my local grocery store.
  

Now what? Does this mean I switch to frozen? My kids fruit addiction does not extend to canned goods. So, should I try shopping at a Whole Foods Market where I've read they include purchasing from local farms in their mission? It seems like that would be the perfect place to find the locally grown, organic, low impact food I'm looking for. Oh wait, the closest one is 40 minutes away. I'm sure my 4 year old would only say "Are we there yet?" 5 or six times in each direction. And I've no doubt I can make it there and back again with the 2 year old and 7 month old in tow without having to change a single diaper in the store's cramped restroom while whoever's not being changed is quietly sitting and waiting for mommy to finish without running around and touching every surface, flushing every toilet, spinning the top on every trash can. Hmmm...I can't travel 40 minutes, each way, every week for my groceries. How is that low impact? Besides, foodroutes.org insisted I actually could find local foods in the Northeast in the winter, even though they were unable to actually tell me where.


Well, luckily it's early on in my quest to buy local, so I haven't become jaded yet. It's time to go out and actually look at what's in the stores in my vicinity. I am fairly certain I can at least find local meat and dairy products nearby. Tomorrow I am going over to Oak Ridge Farm, 6.7 miles away, where "almost every product at Oak Ridge Farm Stand can be traced back to local merchants."

Think they have blueberries?