"Old Mother Hubbard/Went to her cupboard/To give her poor dog a bone./But when she got there/The cupboard was bare,/And so the poor dog had none."
Last week, to my delight, I found pasture-raised pork at the Portland Farmer's Market. It was a great moment of confluence of interests for me, in local food and in humanely raised food. If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you can go to the website of this producer, at www.nwpork.com, to find out who carries their pork. It's funny to me that it mattered so much, since we rarely eat pork, but it did...
In part, this is because food is so integral to the care of children, and so important to them. Our shopping habits have evolved steadily over the years, as we turned to more and more organic foods, and now more and more local foods.
But how to find local foods? It's hard to figure out sometimes--but the local food thing is so hot right now that I thought I'd benefit from expert help. I purchased Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon's Plenty as soon as I could find a copy--and was tremendously disappointed. The book is constructed as a memoir of the year during which they decided to eat from within a 100 mile radius of their home, and it's full of anecdotes of that year, along with smatterings of information about global food production. But I was looking for a different kind of book entirely--one that would really lay out what local food even means, how to find it, how to afford it (since it is typically more expensive to produce and to purchase, for myriad reasons ranging from scale of production to specific forms of government assistance to farmers to cheap oil), how to replace nonlocal ingredients in recipes with local ones, and when to just decide not to try.
Like what am I supposed to do about sugar!!! Honey, which I can buy lots of locally, doesn't act in at all the same way in baking and has much more of a presence. Maple sugar and date sugar, as you may have guessed, aren't produced in Oregon. Neither are maple syrup or agave. Maybe barley malt? Barley syrup and rice syrup? Haven't checked yet... We do grow barley here... And while I have now discovered that beet sugar is grown across the Midwest and that cane sugar is grown in four states (Hawaii, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida), and that some of it is even organic, that's not really local either. So what to do? No helpful suggestions from Smith and MacKinnon, that's for sure. And looking at Barbara Kingsolver's new Animal, Vegetable, Miracle at the bookstore made it seem as if none were forthcoming from that quarter either. So I'm liking the www.100milediet.org website much more than the book itself.
One thing I have found incredibly helpful in my search for local food is shopping at New Seasons online. (If you live here in Portland, you can do this for pick-up at the store or for home delivery.) All items online are marked organic or local, so you can get a quick sense. That's why we've switched to Pacific Village milk and Nancy's cultured dairy products. But you still need to research things more thoroughly--for example, we should probably buy the Noris Dairy milk, all of which comes from Salem... And of course, there's the Farmer's Market, where I also found local walnuts. But dried beans? Flours? Sugar? I still don't know...
"There was an old woman who lived in a shoe./She had so many children, she didn't know what to do./She gave them some broth without any bread,/Then whipped them all soundly, and sent them to bed."
In fact, the most references in children's literature that I've found to mothers of late have been in the context of nursery rhymes and fairy tales--and most of them also refer to food. The cruel mothers of Hansel and Gretel, of Snow White, and of Sleeping Beauty are only the best known, but in rhymes too, mothers feed too much or not enough, the right foods or the wrong ones, as in "Mother made a seedy cake, gave us all a bellyache."
The conjunction, indeed the elision of food and mothering is profound. "I one my mother/I two my mother/I three my mother/I four my mother/I five my mother/I six my mother/I seven my mother/I ate my mother."