The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Apr 12

Having just returned from a trip, and expecting friends and family staying with me, I had some grocery shopping to do this week.  For this good/bad/ugly post I’ll focus on what I’ve bought since I returned to town, since I already posted about the travel.  I also want to try to condense this a bit since I know my posts tend to ramble.

Good: local bread, local hot dogs, local and regional cheese, regional butter, local mushrooms, local potatoes and rainbow carrots1, locally baked cookies.

Bad: Kalamata olives (unknown origin).  Lemon juice (Florida).  Coconut milk (unk.)2  Ginger (unk.)  – I’m not clear on whether this could grow locally.

Ugly: Domestic parmesan 3.  Tortilla chips 4.  Frozen peas5. Organic chicken thighs6.  Raisins (CA)7.  Organic onions and sweet potatoes (unk.)8.

There’s one other “bad” that deserves special mention: gasoline for the car.  Is there such a thing as a “local” gas station?  Somewhat surprisingly, the answer is a qualified yes: Mirabito.  Although they don’t refine their own fuel (their web site shows “materials safety data sheets” or MSDS from Citgo, Valero, and Sunoco) at least much of the profit is being recirculated regionally.  They’re also a strong promoter of alternative fuels (E85 and biodiesel, for example), and even I think those are a dubious sort of “alternative,” at least it shows some awareness that there is an issue.  My guilty (“ugly”) plea: that’s not where I normally buy gas!  I have been favoring Hess for years since I found out that they were a progressive company that was not doing things like fighting fuel economy standards for cars. Unfortunately, they’ve made a big move into fracking in the last couple of years and I should probably shift my business. So perhaps this is a good example of this blog getting me to re-evaluate my actions.

  1. Sorry, not sure which farm.
  2. If someone can figure out how to grow olives, lemons, or coconuts in NY, they’re either a miracle worker or a global-warming survivor.  I should talk about this more at some point.
  3. Probably from Wisconsin.  This gets into the big hairy question of why we can’t make our own cheese on site – the illegal status of unpasteurized milk – which should be a blog post in its own right.
  4. We grow enough corn locally that it seems ridiculous to buy national-brand chips, but I’m not aware of any local alternatives.  I guess you need economies of scale to sell a pound of chips for $4.
  5. Called “Woodstock,” but distributed from RI and declared “product of USA.”  I guess that’s better than world peas.  We grew a lot of beans last year but not much in the way of peas.
  6. Bought for my friends.  We have good local chicken farmers but they mostly sell whole chickens which makes it harder to grab one for a quick home-cooked meal.  For myself I mostly eat vegetarian.
  7. It seems like we ought to be able to find local raisins.  Our attempts to make our own were frustrating, because it takes an unbelievable amount of dehydrator time to get raisins from fresh grapes.
  8. Would normally grow these, but ran out of stock.

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