I was writing a response to Mrs. Q’s blog post about meal planning, grocery shopping, and pantry stocking earlier today. (If you haven’t been following along with Mrs. Q’s quest to improve school lunch, then get thee to Fed Up With Lunch with all due haste.) It got me thinking about how local eating is different from commercial eating. You can’t rotate a set list of recipes – the ingredients won’t be available 365 days a year. You can’t plan meals weeks or months in advance – what if the tomato crop fails? You WILL have a well-stocked pantry but it will have dried beans, nuts, whole grains – not mac and cheese and (commercicially) canned tomatoes.
That’s when I realized that its not just knowledge about food systems that is keeping the masses off the local eating wagon, it’s also a lack of skill-set. We have too-perfect housewives and 1950′s cookbooks to tell us how to plan meals revolving around Cream-of-Eww-Soup – what we need to know is how to keep down costs and keep our sanity when you don’t know the ingredients until you get to the market. It can be done. I promise. By people who don’t live in Stepford, have lives outside the kitchen, and aren’t rolling in the dough.
I’m going to write a series of blog posts with tips for making it work. I will have advise and lots of linky-love with a bit of snark for spice.