Thinking about what you eat

A friend & co-worker of mine is really involved with the local Slow Food movement, and recently started the 100 mile diet challenge. To be perfectly honest, I’m kind of in awe of the whole thing. I certainly don’t need convincing that fresh, local, in-season food is the absolute best… but I’m not ready to start making my own pasta and grinding my own flour either. I think I could absolutely eat only local produce, but when it gets down to the smaller ingredients, sourcing everything you eat from within 100 miles gets a little intense. I’m sure it will be a wonderful experiment, and I’m contemplating having 100 mile day, once a week, or 100 mile meals to help support the project. You do get to have some cheater items, and it is all self-policed, so really you only have to answer to your own conscience…. But how does one choose between coffee and salt? (the two obvious ones for me) Is life without either of them, or only with one of them really worth living? It just sounds like a bland, and grumpy existence to me. But I am in 100% support of the people who do make that choice!

When thinking about the 100 mile diet, I have also been thinking a lot about raw food. In the documentary Food Matters, one of the experts talks about how 51% of each meal should be made up of raw food, and our bodies aren’t meant to process more than that. During the winter, there are only so many salads you can eat… but now, during the summer months when my garden is finally producing, I feel as though raw food is making up a substantial part of my diet.  This is largely in-part to how beautiful fresh produce is. Take beans for example. I have a mix of purple beans, and rattlesnake beans planted, and the striking legumes are by far the most seductive thing in my garden right now. The deep eggplant purple, and the lightly speckled beans are absolutely gorgeous… show-stoppers for sure…. And yet if you cook them, all that amazing color fades to green, and you are left with run of the mill looking green beans. (nothing wrong with that… but when you start out with show-stoppers it seems a shame to turn them into standard). So rather than steaming or roasting the beans, I’ve been chopping them into salads, drizzling them with olive oil, eating them with croutons,  or just munching them off the vine. Because what could be better than fresh, local, beautiful produce? I’m sure I’ll end up cooking a few (it wouldn’t be summer without cooked green beans) but in the meantime I’m enjoying the showy looking salads with delicate flavors… and I’m enjoying not heating up my house with the stove. It’s a win win.

Tonight I chopped up the beans, added a roasted beet (also from my garden), an avocado, fresh basil, olive oil, and black salt. It wasn’t the most amazing salad I’ve ever made in my life, but it might have been the prettiest. And no, avocados aren’t local…. But maybe I can use the raw food rule…. If at least 51% of my meal is local…. Maybe I’ll still make a bit of a difference.