timboerger.net Not afraid of a few strong opinions.

Tyranny of the Small Town

I've spent some time getting used to big cities.  For nearly ten years, I've lived in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Seattle and D.C.  Now none of those cities are like Chicago or New York, but they are a far cry from the small town of around 4,000 I grew up in (and actually, we lived outside of the town).  One thing that we've done in the last few years is find good places to eat well and buy good food.  We usually have to pay a bit more for it, but we think that every penny is worth paying for healthy food.  It had seemed to me that moving to a small rural town would be a no-brainer, that we would be living much closer to the food production source.

Except we're not.  Not really anyway.  Let's completely forget about fruit for a second, because no matter where you go, it's likely being shipped from somewhere.  Let's look at the other foods we have available.

Veggies are a bit of a toss up right now.  We can get them and farmers markets are available.  However, small town grocery does not have an organic veggie section and I'm not sure where a lot of the food comes from.  Mostly overseas, from what I can tell.  This area is a bit of a push as the farmers markets are pretty high in quality and there's a lot of them about.

Meat...hands down, we're in better hands here.  Not hard to find locally raised meat and with a little research, we can find and talk to the ranchers and butchers who do the work.  We need to be careful though as grass-fed anything is still rare.  We'll have to do our footwork on this, but it will pay off when we find good supplies.

No, where we have the biggest danger is in processed foods.  I know you must be thinking "but that's pretty much against local and/or organic", and you would be right.  However, there's a lot to be said for lightly processed foods (canned tomatoes, crackers, etc.) that are organic in nature.  One of the big things I try to keep out of my diet is high fructose corn syrup.  I can't say one way or another if this is helping me overall, but try finding ordinary foods in a regular grocery without it.  It's surprising how much it is in everything.  I didn't have that problem so much when we would shop at places that tried to keep everything either local or organic.

I find it is an irony that in some ways we are closer to the food we eat but yet we are so much further away in the ways that count.