charlotte harris

I recently finished reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, and more than ever I want to fast forward to the part of my life I have been patiently waiting for — you know that part with the cozy little house in the country with a backyard big enough for a garden and a hammock and a couple of ankle biters running around pulling up all my lettuce?

Planting a lush vegetable garden and pickling and canning have long been on my dream to-do list.  I have been biding my time in a series of apartments and condos, knowing one day I will have a backyard to grow in, a kitchen large enough to can in, and a pantry deep enough to store in.  I’ll have a lifestyle that keeps me close to home so I can water and weed and love on those plants.  Even a tiny patio herb garden would wither right now because I spend too much time away from home.

It’s something I daydream out loud about pretty regularly these days. 

Now Barbara Kingsolver has pretty much wrecked me for good.  Not only do I long to garden and pickle, but after reading her book I have added chickens and cheesemaking to my wish list.  Fresh eggs!  Homemade mozzarella!  I want to fast forward to the chapter of my own life where my hypothetical kids help me in the kitchen and get excited about Friday Family Pizza Night!

Who knows when I’ll get my big backyard and my root cellar and those helpful teenagers, so in the meantime, I am inspired by Barbara’s pleas to eat locally and in season and choose organic however I can right now. 

This isn’t exactly a new concept for me… I have subscribed to a CSA in the past but found myself skipping town or making plans so often during that time of year that I missed too many vegetable pickups to make it worth the several hundred dollars I paid up front.  I have gratefully accepted bag-fuls of zucchini and tomatoes from my green-thumbed friends and family, knowing that a juicy Early Girl grown in my Dad’s garden is going to taste so much more exceptional than anything from Giant, and that the zucchini grown by my coworker’s wife in Frederick, MD is going to be fat enough to make a loaf of bread AND a salad.

Now that they’re open for the season, I will absolutely shop the weekend growers markets and have loved doing so in the past.  My current dilemma is that half of the weekends I am not even sleeping at my own home, so I can’t exactly roll out of bed and hit the farmers markets then run home to stock up my kitchen.  Because the growers markets will work for me only about half the time, I am left to the grocery produce section the remaining weeks.  So this Tuesday, when I returned from vacation and made a desperate trip to the Harris Teeter, I vowed to buy only locally grown fruits and veggies.

Harder said than done. 

I managed to keep it in the USA family, but most of the stuff I got was from California.  Asparagus is in season in these parts now, so why couldn’t I get some locally-grown asparagus?  Lettuce is growing up all over this region right now, but my big bunch of lettuce wasn’t grown down the road here, either.  I needed scallions and parsley for my hummus recipe, both of which I think should have been available from a local producer, but weren’t.  

The grocery store is not buying locally.  Sections of Barbara’s book, especially some co-written by her husband Steven L. Hopp, explain why stores often buy truckloads of produce from across the country instead of buying smaller deliveries locally.  I have always heard arguments both for and against this practice.  I read an article in the Economist last summer arguing against buying local organic produce because it uses more fuel to make more smaller deliveries than it does to make one large delivery.

Yes there’s a price for fuel, but there’s also a price for putting local farmers out of business or for buying fruits and vegetables grown treated with insecticides.  If I were to recap all of her thoughtful talking points, I would have to quote half the book right here, so I recommend you just read it cover to cover.  Even if you have no intention of getting dirt under your nails, it’s still such an informative and eye-opening read.  This book will remain on my bookshelf as a reference manual from here on out.

I don’t ever anticipate taking as firm a stance as Barbara and her family did.  The bananas I buy will likely never be from a from a northern Virginia farm.  Barbara would say something like: So just don’t eat bananas.  Get your potassium from some local potatoes instead.   But I am not quite ready to dip fingerlings into my morning yogurt.  Yogurt which I now know I can make easily at home!