Low Mileage Food

One of the things I’ve been wanting to talk about here is the experience of local foods – how good things taste, how nice it is to get to talk to the people that make and harvest our foods, that sort of thing. So, some bits and pieces from the last few weeks:

- Our milk is sold to us by a grizzled, taciturn, older man who has probably been doing something related to farming since he could walk. He’s not unfriendly, just quiet in that older Southern gentleman kind of way, and it pleased me, when, after six months of buying milk from him, we got him to say more than a couple words, and even got him to smile a couple times.

A few weeks ago, he was talking about how he was worried about how everything had been getting more expensive and milk was getting more expensive to produce and he might have to increase prices. Sure enough, the next week, it had gone from $3.99 a gallon to $4.25. At a grocery store, that would be enough to make me scurry for another brand of milk. Coming from the man in the ball cap who raises the milk? We were glad to pay it. (Oddly enough, it’s still $3.99 at Deep Roots.)

- Everyone at the market has been tired lately. It’s winter. It’s cold. Traffic is down. It’s cold. (Well, I take it back; not everyone. Francine Molner, who sells us our cheese, would be warm, friendly, and downright cheerful if the building were falling down around us, I do believe.) It’s… nice, feeling like a part of the little community there, being a regular, commiserating about the weather and all of us waiting for spring to come.

- The Quaker Acres, our honey folks, haven’t been out at the market lately (well, they were last week. They were not the week before, when we were out of honey, nor a few weeks before that.) So we got honey from Deep Roots. It was tagged as gallberry honey, from “the coast of North Carolina.” It has a rather strong flavor that’s hard to describe. I really like the stuff; Jeff doesn’t care for it as much. Still, we tried something new, and it’s certainly not going to go to waste; it’ll get eaten (he liked it fine in the teriyaki sauce the other night, just not on waffles with peanut butter). I think eating more locally has made us braver about trying new things, which has been rather nice.