March is the hardest time of year for local food. It's the one remaining month of the year in which the Ithaca Farmer's Market closes its doors entirely. Even the earliest of spring greens won't be available until April, fresh fruit won't appear again until June, and winter foods are feeling the stress of long-term storage. So it definitely makes for an interesting challenge to stay out of the imported-from-the-tropics and shipped-from-California produce aisles in the supermarket.
On the other hand, last fall's challenge upset the balance of our bulk stores, and we've had some problems recently with certain bulk foods going rancid before they reach our dinner plates. So cutting them out of our diet for another month seems like a bad plan right now.
After putting the two together, we decided to try a slightly different challenge this time. We're going to do a Preparedness Challenge, and use the opportunity to evaluate how resilient our food stores would be in the event of a major supply disruption. This challenge combines the most difficult part of a winter locavore challenge -- fruits and vegetables -- with a test of how effectively we've stocked the pantry. And it gives us the opportunity to experiment with workarounds for the short-term perishables that we're bound to run out of.
For the sake of sanity, we're going to limit ourselves to testing food preparedness, and continue to use water and energy as usual. (In the event of a real supply disruption that included water and energy as well as food, we wouldn't be expected to keep working and going to school...) And we're not allowing ourselves to stock up in advance, though we will go ahead and buy the things that are already on our February shopping list.
So, in brief, here are the rules we're setting for our Preparedness Challenge:
- No stocking up ahead of time
- No grocery runs in March
- Use water and energy as usual
Hi Marty, it sounds like you've set up another interesting challenge for yourselves! I wonder where CSAs fall in your plan? If there was a real emergency would we be able to continue to pick up our food directly from the farmers we have contracted with in the CSA?
ReplyDeleteI eat unprocessed local food from the pantry all of the time, but I have a garden, chickens, two freezers with meats and fruits and veggies, a root cellar, and a good part of the basement filled with canning jars and super pails with staples. For dairy we rely on a milk CSA. I make cheese, yogurt, kefir, butter, etc.
But all this took time to gather and takes some time to maintain. I'm interested to see how it works if there isn't one person home most of the time to focus on the processing of the basic ingredients into food - grains to bread, pasta, etc., milk into yogurt, cheese etc.
I've just found your blog from Ithaca's Food Web and, as I've just been looking at my somewhat scanty pantry and trying to plan, I will be following your progress with great interest. I hope you'll post what you have already in your pantry that you're working with. Good luck with your challenge!
ReplyDeleteI will be posting details of my pantry stocks, probably a bit at a time as I go through them. I'm also going to talk about how I maintain those stocks. Since this is a test of how well our day-to-day process works to prepare us for supply disruptions, assessing the process is an important part of the challenge.
ReplyDeleteWe aren't currently using a CSA, so the question hasn't come up for us. We have something we call a "winter foods CSA", but really it's a neighborhood bulk buying club. We each guess how much of various root veggies we're going to use over the winter, then we put it together into a seasonal bulk buy from local farmers and store it in a community root cellar. Since the food is already there, within walking distance of my front door, I'm going to assume it will stay there.
In a genuine food supply disruption, what would happen with CSAs depends on other assumptions. We're assuming we still have access to fuel, so there's no reason to think we couldn't continue driving to a local farm to pick things up. And it's also reasonable to assume that the farmers would continue to give their pre-paid customers priority over the public market, though they might respond to the crisis by cutting back portion sizes and offering the surplus to food relief efforts. If they have good stocks of fodder for their animals, it's reasonable to expect that they would continue to produce, but there's a possibility that the farm might run out of some critical supplies and their yields might drop.
On the other hand, if the emergency was caused by a natural disaster, all bets are off as far as who even still has a pantry and who still has a farm. We're basically not going to go there. We're also not considering the possibility that someone might get desperate enough to raid known food supplies. Both of those issues are beyond the scope of what we're trying to assess.