THE AUTHOR'S DAUGHTER MARGARET
WITH HER CHICKENS
Buying half or a quarter of a cow will stretch your
creativity. It’s not all steaks and ground beef. I’ve come
across cuts of meat I’d never heard of. A package of
kidneys comes with the deal. Tail is actually delicious.
4-H meat is another way to ensure the animal you are
eating had a nice home and a name. After the 4-H summer
fair, local businesses buy the kids’ livestock, and then sell
it to the public. We have purchased a 4-H hog at 4-Star
Meat Company with yummy results.
LOCAL GRAINS AND OTHER STAPLES
Every year in late August, we make a large bulk order at
Hummingbird Wholesale. They carry Camas Mill’s local
grains and legumes, along with other staples like honey.
Hummingbird has a storefront with smaller portions of
these locally harvested staples, but I go for the 50 lb. bags.
Having these staples on hand ensures we eat them
regularly. Rather than thinking, “I ought to serve more
black beans,” I simply cook up the black beans we have.
Instead of running to the store for pasta, I experiment by
serving polenta. Most of our staples are stored in 5-gallon
buckets with Gamma lids (found at WinCo). Miller moths,
mice and weevils are no match for these lids, and they are
easy to open when a human wants some grain.
AREA FRUIT FARMS
We live in a glorious valley for fruit production. My
little hamster trail of you-pick produce takes me out to J and
M Farms for strawberries, Green-Hill-Aire for blueberries,
Detering Orchards for peaches and Gravenstein apples
that make the most decadent applesauce, Thistledown for
random fruit runs, friends’ backyards for plums and pears.
I think fully half the calories my son consumes in the
summer come from the tenacious blackberries encroaching
on our property.
There is more dirt and fewer chemicals to wash away
on the fruit we gather. The energy spent drying, canning
and freezing in the summer is paid back all winter long,
in smoothies, oatmeal, on top of pancakes or straight out
of the jar.
THE
PLANT A BIG GARDEN, OR COMMIT TO
A CSA BOX, AND EAT EVERYTHING
100-
MILE
DIET
“I
f we had a cow,” my daughter said, hope
resonant in her voice, “we wouldn’t have to
go to the store at all.”
We are not getting a cow. Our family is
already scrambling and busy without the
addition of milking anything.
But Margaret was right. With our garden, the chickens,
staples from Hummingbird Wholesale, home canning and
the freezer full of meat, we have everything on hand that
we eat regularly, with the exception of milk products.
And I do really hate going to the store.
My husband and I didn’t get up one morning and
suddenly decide to adopt a 100-mile diet, with an emphasis
on our own produce.
As eaters, we’re just not that ambitious. But a slow
process of thoughtful bulk buying, gardening, preserving
and storing had yielded a nearly self-sufficient kitchen.
When I’d thought of local diets and self-sufficiency in
EUGENEWEEKLY.COM/CHOW
Adventures in
Locavore Living
BY ANNA GRACE
PHOTO BY ANNA GRACE
the past, I imagined stalwart food fundamentalists, growing
overly thin on a diet of amaranth and dried zucchini. But in
Lane County, farms and retailers make it not only easy to
eat local, but cost effective and endlessly delicious.
LOCAL, HUMANELY RAISED MEAT
Negotiating the morality of being an omnivore is chal-
lenging. But look closely and you will find farms humanely
raising meat throughout the Willamette Valley: Deck Family
Farm, Fair Valley Farm and Living Earth Farm to name a few.
We buy half a cow from Knee Deep Cattle Company.
I love chatting with the farmer who owns the place as I
pick up our beef at their family home and barn, just across
Lorane Highway from where next year’s cattle are grazing.
Bulk meat takes advance financial planning, but saves
considerable money. In the past we have split bulk orders
with friends and family. Today, two secondhand freezers
stand in our carport, holding summer produce and meat.
“This one produces ‘armloads of solid, crisp fruit …’”
my husband Jeff reads from the seed packet of cucumbers.
We are standing in the back room at Down to Earth in early
February, to plan for a harvest that won’t hit full swing for
another half a year.
“Armloads?” I confirm. “That’s the one for us.”
Fast forward seven months and we are standing in
the kitchen, cucumbers covering every surface, recipes
for gazpacho and tzatziki open and resting on top of the
produce. An ill-fated pickle project is in my way, just
starting to smell funny. I consider taking a few “armloads”
of cucumbers back to Down to Earth.
Committing to eat everything you grow takes a special
kind of grit in the beginning. After a while the chaos of
abundance becomes normal. I stopped planning meals in
advance, and started walking down to the garden to find
out what was for dinner. Recipes became less strict. This
soup calls for two red peppers? How about ten?
If your home does not allow for a garden, CSA boxes
produce roughly the same results, without the aphids.
Participating farms pack up a box for you each week with
whatever is going nuts in their soil. The Willamette Farm
& Food Coalition is a brilliant help for someone starting
on this journey and further information can be found at
lanefood.org/find-local-food/csa-programs.
As I write this in early January, I sit in a kitchen with
squash piled up in a corner, ropes of chilies, garlic and
shallots hanging from the ceiling, an army of home-canned
fruit lining the shelves behind me.
We’ve learned that locavore life isn’t about sacrifice and
self-congratulation. It’s about the comfort of a delicious
meal provided by the hands of our neighbors and the land
that we live on.
Jeff and I started down this road of local food in pursuit
of deliciousness. Looking back we see a small but satisfying
little dent in our family’s carbon footprint, minimizing the
miles our food traveled and the miles we traveled to get it.
Now all we need is a cow.
CHOW WINTER 2017
7