Buy Fresh! Buy Local

Buy Fresh! Buy Local.

My personal mandate is to buy as much food as possible from my local farmers market, which isn’t hard because it happens to be held where I work. As anyone who has the tendency to get seduced by vegetables can tell you, the buying is the easy part. Responsibly consuming all the delicious produce I bring home can be more of a challenge, and after actually watching the effort it takes to grow food, nothing can make you feel like more of a heel than letting spoil that head of escarole you’ve watched someone plant, cultivate, and harvest in ninety degree weather. Someday when we know each other better I’ll tell you about the twenty five pounds of cabbage I bought for a failed experiment in sauerkraut, but I’m not there yet.

What saves you with truly local produce is that it lasts a lot longer than the supermarket equivalent. Take this sweet potato. It was the daddy of them all from the sweet potato row at the Wyck Home Farm, weighing in at almost three pounds. I cut off part of it for one dinner, and saved the rest. Somehow it migrated to the very back of the fridge only to be found six weeks later, looking like this. A little cosmetic surgery on the end rot and it was fine again, making a decent appearancesw in a curried chicken soup with lentils.