Local Lunch!

Our local lunch was as easy to prepare as it was delicious.  As with breakfast, it was convenient not to have to travel to a dining hall or eatery—instead we had a miniature picnic in my dorm room.  For the lunch we made sandwiches with fresh bread from Market Shares (to our pleasant surprise the bread stayed fresh even after a few days) as well as a sundried tomato feta spread, fresh tatsoi and fresh mozzarella (from the farmers’ market).  We also ate a few delicious carrots and washed it all down with a glass of local milk.

The whole process was simple, quick, and yummy.  Perhaps our biggest challenge came from the fact that we, as college students, simply lack the kitchen supplies normally needed to make a meal.  For instance, cutting a loaf of bread with a butter knife can take a while…nevertheless, the food was great and filling.  Perhaps my favorite thing about this meal was that afterwards I felt full, but not in a heavy, I-can’t-move-or-I’ll-explode sort of way.  The food is light and leaves you feeling refreshed rather than overly full.

I had expected our local meals would be significantly more labor intensive, but lunch was surprisingly easy to pull off.  Because we only made sandwiches, there were almost no dishes and the preparation time was minimal.  A more extensive meal would definitely have been more time-intensive, but at least for local sandwiches, the whole process took very little work!

The ambience around eating local foods is also remarkably different.  Rather than sitting in a bustling and noisy dining hall, we were able to play our own music and eat where and when we wanted to.  Of course the community and plain quantity of people found in a dining hall cannot quite be replicated when making a small, local meal, but if you get enough friends involved, you can create a (local) community of your own just the way you want it!

Local breakfast!

We started off our experiment with a delicious breakfast composed purely of local food!

Our breakfast was apples, yogurt, and milk, all from our market share, which I’ve posted about here.

Both Nora and I really enjoyed the breakfast -- it was really lovely not having to make the trek over to a dining hall to start off our day. Instead we were able to begin our day in our PJs in the kitchen in our dorm!

Neither of us are big “breakfast people”, so the breakfast of yogurt, apples and milk was perfectly satisfying, though if we wanted a heartier breakfast it would’ve been super easy to scramble some eggs to go with it! The yogurt by itself was a little bland, but eaten with a bite of apple was delectable! In retrospect, buying local honey at the farmers market might have been a smart idea to add to the yogurt, and if the commitment was made to eat locally for more than one day, would’ve definitively been a worthy investment.

While eating, we started talking about how berries or another type of fruit would’ve been great with the yogurt as well, which got us thinking about one of the main limitations of local food: variety. It's a common theme in criticisms of the local food movement, and one that's definitely worth thinking about. We only ate locally for one day, if we continued our experiment for a week, or even a year I think we would've had a lot more trouble with our taste buds getting bored!

All in all though, we couldn’t have asked for a better start to our project!

Farmers' Market!

After much RIFTA research, on Saturday, November 19^th we finally made it down to the Pawtucket Winter Farmer’s Market!  Despite some logistical challenges (I may or may not have jumped the gun in getting us off the bus a few stops too soon…) we finally arrived and were very pleasantly surprised.  The market, which spans the long hallway of an enormous old industrial building, offers everything from apples and brussel sprouts to music and hand cream.

Before making any purchases, we took some time to simply walk up and down the hallway, taking in the colorful displays of foods and local goods (not to mention the free samples!).  Many stands offer the same vegetables or fruits, so it is a good idea to survey the prices and qualities at different stands (we made the mistake of buying the only $1.50 garlic clove in the market—the rest were marked at $1).  Besides basic fruits and vegetables, there are also great offerings in terms of prepared foods made with local ingredients.  Much to our pleasure, we found everything from local pasta and tomato sauce to crepes, bread, and other pastries. 

With the prepared foods we also found it helpful to inquire about how local the ingredients were.  For most stands all the ingredients were grown locally, but when we asked about the ingredients of a salad dressing we learned that the major ingredients (olive oil, vinegar) were not local.  Of course items such as olive oil are more difficult to come by locally (unfortunately, not everything can be grown in RI), but it certainly impacted our decision of whether we wanted spend $7 on a salad dressing that wasn’t completely local (ultimately, we opted not to).

Because of the generosity of Brown’s fabulous Market Shares, we did not have too much left to buy at the Farmers’ Market for our local day meal, but we did make some purchases.

We bought: a clove of garlic ($1.50), fresh pasta ($8), fresh mozzarella ($5), and tomato sauce ($6) to complete our Market Share meals. 

For anyone else who would like to venture down to the market (I would highly suggest it!) this calendar of when fruits and vegetables are in season is extremely helpful in planning meals. 

Even when eating “non-locally” in dining halls or Providence restaurants it’s useful to know what is in season (and therefore more likely to have been grown locally).  For instance, right now (November-December) if there is asparagus in the Ratty, chances are it was not grown in RI.  Good to know, right?

Also, a word on RIFTA and buses: RIFTA is free with your Brown ID (and the 99 bus takes you straight to Pawtucket!).  Nevertheless, be sure to plan the bus you want to take both ways.  We made the mistake of assuming we could catch the same bus back to College Hill, and ended up waiting 40 minutes. This problem can easily be avoided, it just requires a bit of planning. If you get a routine down, it would be a snap!

Brown Market Shares!

Brown Market Shares rocks.

For a few reasons. First, is that, after hearing about our experiment, they gave us entire share for free because they had some extra left over (don’t worry though, we’ll hash out the pricing in a later post!)

Second, is that the process is so incredibly easy. I walked into Hillel, smack in the middle of campus, and picked up my share, while chatting with the super amicable volunteers who helped me out.

Included in the share was:

Onion (1) from Mello Farm

Apples (5) from Hill Orchard and Barden Orchards

Tatsoi (1 bunch) from Rosasharn

Parsnips (1 Ib) from Four Town Farm
Greens (1 bunch) from Rosasharn

Potatoes (2 Ib) from Maplewood Farm and Rosasharn

Carrots (1 Ib) from Shartner

Bread (1 loaf) from Seven Stars Bakery

Not only did they provide us with a produce share, but they were also kind enough to give us a dairy share, which included:

Eggs: a dozen eggs from either Pat's Pastured or Zephyr Farms.
Milk: a half-gallon of Rhody Fresh milk.
Cheese: 8 ounces of Pirate Spread (Feta base) from Narragansett Creamery.
Yogurt: 16 ounces of whole plain yogurt from Narragansett Creamery

And third, is that all of the food they gave us was absolutely delectable! Such an incredibly positive experience, based off of it, I could really not recommend the program higher.

Stay tuned for what we did with all of this delicious food after we sourced it!

Here's a preview:

It's go time, baby!

Our plan of action for this experiment is set.

On this Sunday the 20^th, Nora and I will be eating as locally as we can, all day! The following day, Monday the 21^st, we’ll be just be eating in the Ratty and other Brown campus eateries. Both days, we’ll be carefully documenting (to the best of our ability) what we eat, how it tastes, how we got it, and where it came from.

The past week, we’ve been in serious planning mode. We’ve arranged to get food from Brown’s fantastic Market Share’s program on Thursday (which we’ll cover in more detail in a following post), planned to make a trip to Pawtucket/Winter-time Farmers Market this Saturday (which we’ll also cover), and possibly a trip to Whole Foods or Eastside Marketplace in case we need to fill in some gaps in our menu.

We’ve also arranged to borrow the UEL kitchen for the day!

We’re currently brainstorming some recipe ideas given what’s in season (based on this super helpful calendar provided by Farm Fresh RI which details what’s in season), so if anything sounds like a good idea throw it out in the comments!

Oh hey there!

Hey!

We’re Nora and Kyle.

Hummus-addicts, bad singers, and sleep-deprived students at Brown University.

But, more importantly for this blog, we’re budding environmentalists. We've spent the semester learning about the many, vast problems with the environment, and we've come to realize how much important work there is to do. We can’t do it all, but by focusing our attention on one aspect of the fight for a sustainable future, we believe that we can make a difference.

Our part is the local food movement.

By eating locally, carbon dioxide emissions are reduced, local businesses are supported, food safety is promoted, and often, the food just tastes better.

But, as poor college students, we get that it’s not easy – especially with a meal plan where the swipe of a card gets you all you can eat and bus systems to grocery stores might as well be written in Latin. Frankly, eating locally as a student can seem pretty impossible.

In this blog, we hope to help.

First, we’re going to attempt to quantify the exact effect that eating locally has on the environment versus eating on our school’s meal plan. We’ll be spending one day cooking and consuming local food, and one day eating in our school’s dining halls, the Ratty and the V-Dub. On both days, we’ll document exactly what we consume in order to share it with you, as well as to track its environmental impact, which, for the sake of this experiment, we'll be focusing on carbon footprint.

But we're also going to focus on how we feel about the whole experience. How convenient, expensive, and time-consuming it is to eat locally versus in a dining hall. How our food tastes, the experience we have preparing it (as well as cleaning it up).

This is our experiment that we hope you’ll join us for.  We’re pretty excited about it, but we also understand that it’s just that – an experiment, and one that's probably not replicable every single day.

So, while we go on this journey, in addition to our research, comments, and reflections, we hope to provide resources and advice, to those on Brown’s campus, other college students, and just people in general. Eating locally isn’t a switch you can just easily throw – at least not for more than a day – but we hope to explore how we can take small steps by changing our personal consumption habits and seeing just how large of an affect those changes can have.

We’d really love to have you along.