50%, more or less

After air and water, food is crucial to a human’s survival. And luckily, I already have access to local supplies of the first two!

So now it’s time for me to focus more on local supplies of the third.

This month, people across Nova Scotia are signing up and pledging to eat more local foods. My friend Alicia Lake is one of the driving forces of this month-long club, since she’s been challenging herself to go 100% local for a month, for a few years now. (Her personal blog is here.)

I signed up, although I’ll tell you a secret that’s not really a secret, I don’t care too much about the numbers. I’m not figuring out my food budget and making sure 50% of it is spent locally. I’m not keeping track of what I eat daily and how much of it is local.

I know myself well enough now to know that if I committed to doing that, it would quickly lose appeal for me and then I would just stop. I’m not a marathon runner or even a “Couch-to-5K”-er. I walk 10 minutes when I can and an hour another day, when I can. It’s just how I roll: I like to keep track of things and work on a goal in a way that’s easy for me and approachable, and not bring stress.

So for me, what I’m focusing on for this month and this challenge are the actions: going to the Farmer’s Market, sourcing other foods from the farm gate, reading the posts other people are leaving on the Facebook group, looking for local foods that are in the supermarket, asking the supermarket for more local foods, and bringing more local foods into my and Adam’s diet.

And that’s another key point: I have Adam to deal with. He’s a fussy eater and doesn’t like change. Seriously. The guy doesn’t eat mushrooms, fish, a variety of veggies, and likes to have meat with every meal. He also doesn’t love the “weirdo” grains like quinoa, buckwheat, etc. If it were just me I was cooking for, I’d be eating big veggie steams every night. But, that’s not the situation.

More than making sure I hit 50% on the nose, what’s important for me is that I’m realistic about what I can accomplish, and that I challenge myself to actually accomplish it. We all have our own unique situations that can make it challenging to eat local. What’s important is that we work on it anyway.

One thing I’m loving about the 50% Local Food Club page is all the recipes they have gathered! Check them out here.

Gif at top of post made with the PartyParty app.