Thursday, September 1, 2011

The Pantry Purge

I stayed up late last night emptying the pantry of non-local traife. It was quite a task, since we normally keep several months' supply of bulk goods on hand. There's a lot of empty shelf space now, but there's also a surprising number of foods that passed muster. The oil section is stocked with sunflower oil (bulk local from Greenstar) and Stony Brook squash oil (Geneva, 45 miles). There's a homemade cooking wine (front arbor, 8 feet) from our first winemaking experiment two years ago, and honey (bulk local from Greenstar) and maple syrup (Schoolyard Sugarbush, Moravia, 22 miles). I discovered, to my chagrin, that our previously bottomless supply of cider vinegar has run out -- it seems we've gotten more efficient at using up the cider (Littletree, Newfield, 8 miles) before it gets too fizzy.

I'm pleased by the variety of beans & grains that we have in stock, thanks to the folks at Cayuga Pure Organics (Brooktondale, 6 miles.) We also have one granola (bulk local from Greenstar,) though most of the local granolas we've located so far either contain wheat or are priced as a luxury food, not a staple. So we're still working on that one.

The Exceptions

The funny thing is, I'm still not sure just what our five exceptions are going to be. It's also hard to know where to place the boundaries when I'm counting them, e.g. If I wanted, I could construe "rice" to include processed rice products, and I could list "nuts" instead of breaking it out into individual species. But since the goal is to minimize our non-local foods, there's no point. At first I was thinking it would be hard to narrow it down to 5, but at this point it seems like most of the foods we were considering are nonessential.

Here are the ones we're sure of:
  1. rice & rice pasta
  2. almonds (for almond milk)
  3. peanut butter
Here are some others we're considering:
  • pink lentils (as an alternate flour)
  • kombucha (or, more accurately, sugar & tea for making kombucha; I don't need them for anything else, but if I let the mama go for too long I'll lose it)
  • chocolate (because it's hard to justify calling this local, even if it is locally produced)
We also have some possible exceptions that only apply to Sophia:
  • margarine (in case her sinuses blow up on butter)
  • birthday party food (she's adamant about having her coconut ice cream, and cake from a mix)

1 comment:

  1. Partner Perspective

    Purge is a good word for it. I went off to work with the pantry overflowing, and came back to something close to barren. Ironically, much of the stuff that was purged (other than convenience breakfast cereals) is pretty low on the energy ladder -- things like the "non-local" oats or the whole kidney or navy beans might well be grown in the northeast, but we don't have traceable provenance. In any case, they're a lot more efficient (and nutritious) than the ones you get in a can (rolled oats, or pre-cooked beans).

    (Yes, I expect someone to argue that the cooking energy is more efficient in the factory. But you also have to look at the whole chain of the canning process including metal ore extraction, label printing...)

    Looking at the exceptions list, I must admit I'm very guilty on both the rice and peanut butter fronts. When I was looking for a breakfast food that I could eat on work days without taking a lot of time to cook something, rice seemed like the best solution I could think of. I'm not quite ready to trade in $2/lb rice for $8/lb granola. Similar deal with lunch, where I tend to eat while working and need something with protein in it that I can slap together without waiting for cooking time. And at least there are a lot of peanuts grown in the east, as compared to (for example) almonds.

    Ideally, I'd like our hazelbert (hazelnut/filbert cross) bushes to be producing enough so we could just make local hazelnut butter. Yum. But it will be a few years for those to reach full productive age.

    On the plus side, I was able to determine that the Organic Valley milk I'm buying is coming out of a plant in Syracuse. They make a "local" labeled container, but I have found that all the containers with the "tear" spouts go bad much more quickly than the ones with the "screw top" spouts, and the "local" OgVal has the tear-open top. So I'll go with the Syracuse-based one that keeps instead of the one I have to throw out when I'm only half-finished.

    I'm also buying NY state cheddar (same as before the challenge), but really wishing they'd change the raw milk rules so that my neighbor who *makes* cheese could get milk to make it. (In fact, she ages it in my root cellar, so it can't be any more local.) I'm also a huge fan of Finger Lakes Farmstead Cheese company (http://www.fingerlakes-cheese.com/), which you won't hear Marty blogging about because they avoid dairy.

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