Tired nights

A cold winter night in February. A long day at work. A little bit of insomnia. I can see how all this is adding up to dubious thoughts on the viability of living la vida local. It is hard to come home tired everynight from work and feel like making a home cooked meal. Whittle down the ingredients you can cook with based on geography and it is even less fun.

Often with these living-life-alternative-to-the-mainstream endeavors there is a hump to get over and then it gets easier. Once you have done the research and know where you can get/buy/grow/freeze and/or can items and what time of year, things get easier. But it is a lot of research to figure these things out. I'm no longer under the illusion this will be a breeze. Especially so long as I keep spending all of my days at an office and want to make time for a family who doesn't like me to be on the computer when I am home. I'm interested to see how far I can get as in individual before I hit up against the need for more collective action.

Tonight we did manage to take one baby step with a mostly local meal in February. We had mealoaf (local ground beef, onions, spinach still frozen from my summer garden, salt) and celery root mash potatoes (thanks to my friend Indigo for that recipe!) Delicious! And minus the salt, it was an all local meal in February! Yea for small successes. April asparagus season is still a ways off however.

Everytime I go grocery shopping in these food stores that although offer organics, are still part of the industrial, global food system, I see all the things I won't be able to buy if my limit is 250 miles or what's available out my own back door. It's a new lens to look at the world through.

I remember after my stint in Panama I never looked at land the same again. Whereas before my life there I saw wildflower habitat, forests, and various lovely ecozones in which to spend my days naming the plants and animals, after Panama all I could see were good hills to grown corn on and bogs that would make a great rice paddy. In college I remember becoming frustrated with the environmental worldview where all I could see was what was wrong with the concrete landsacape and out of alignment with nature. It gets tiresome always looking at the world from that critical lens.

Sometimes I feel that I just need to let go of the critical mind and enjoy whatever is in front of me no matter what it is or where it came from or what consequences it has. I can sometimes find relief from an impending sense of despair by reveling in man's ingenuity and creativity. At least I can marvel at the incredible genius of the human mind that created all our little inventions and huge global systems. I keep myself going in times of overload by grooving on the idea that if we could just start using nature's design parameters, I am absolutely positive we could design ourselves an incredibly ingenious sustainable, harmonious human world too.

It is a bit difficult to not let the locavore lens become a weight on one's shoulder, but rather keep it a celebration of local delights. Maybe if I was a work-in-the-home-mom and could spend more of my days thinking about my purchases and mapping out a plan of attack for local buying in this City, then the delight part would come easier. I'm sure there are other Santa Feans who have done or are doing this locavore thing - so if you are out there, please send me your research! For example, where does one set about buying a new duvet in Santa Fe at a local store that doesn't cost upwards of $350? This has taken me days of research and still no answer. Do without the duvet you say? Certainly one solution. Learn to knit? Another full time job. A duvet could be considered a luxury, and therefore easily done without. But my locavore challenge is centered around food, not so easily done without. So then, where do I find a local olive oil producer? Do without olive oil? Not so sure about that. That might have to go on the exception list.

In order to keep from going crazy looking at all the things we can't have in the winter-time grocery store and absent from the Farmer's Market, we've decided each Selby family member gets to have 3 exceptions to the locavore list. I'm still pondering mine. So far I'm considering coffee, olive oil, and rice. Although I constructed some mean rice paddy/fish ponds in Panama so maybe I can replicate that here, we certainly have enough mud this week! And if I can wean myself off coffee again, I'd trade it for salt. Clayton will likely keep his string cheese, kiwi and strawberries, and Taylor his date-prune-chickory tea drink thing (ingredients from around the world, he needs a cap and trade deal just for that one so that counts as three items).

I'm signing off now. Need to get some sleep so I can have energy to shop local when shopping is a necessity.