Eating local

I always sort of smile whenever I run into people being very adamant about this. I think it's good to eat food that was grown close to you--it tastes better, it's riper (because it didn't have to be picked green to ship it to you), and it's bound to have more nutrients in it because they haven't had time to leach out. But the thing is, it's easy to eat locally when you live somewhere that actually...grows food. When I go to the store here, the "local" produce is from Seattle. Um...I live close to the border of Wyoming? If I ONLY ate local food, we would eat potatoes all the time (plugging our ears at the First Lady's anti-potato sentiments), lots of wheat products like pasta, and elk and maybe a little buffalo meat. Before interstates and food from far away, people were actually malnourished in places like this. My grandma (born 1902) said in the winter, they used to get boils from lack of vitamins. You know what? I actually don't want to go back to those days.

However, tonight we really are eating local. Our neighbors did spud harvest and gave us some extras, and so we are having baked potatoes tonight which were grown just down the road. We are also having zucchini bread, made out of zucchini from the backyard of different neighbors and flour ground in Blackfoot, down the way a bit on I-15. No, it's not fresh crab and corn and succulent roasted tomatoes and delicate grapes, but hey, on a gloomy day in late October, it's not bad.