We set ourselves a challenge last summer to eat only locally grown foods (from within a thirty-five mile radius) for a whole year. We picked a bad year to do it—a year of unprecedented rainfall and ruined harvests, and the same year in which we’ve been living rough in a hut on the hill with a kitchen consisting of a basic gas stove and…well, that’s it. No power, plumbing, refrigeration or food storage besides our deep freezers that are plugged in to a power outlet a couple of miles away, and no food garden to grow our own fresh produce (we left that behind when we traded our little homestead for a feral life on the land).
Our year is reaching a close. We set out on our challenge last June, in the height of strawberries and cream season, when fresh produce was plentiful, the lambs were growing fat on summer grass and living was relatively easy. We’ve been eating mostly homegrown and local for years, but we had slipped into some conveniences since leaving our kitchen and homestead behind and we were starting to feel it, so this was meant to challenge us to get us back on track, and to really keep us thinking about where our food was coming from, even when things got harder later in the year. We weren’t prepared for just how challenging the year would be.
Our own sheep meat is the mainstay of our diet and has been for years. It’s what grows on our rough, hill land and the sheep flock is where my main focus has been for the past half decade. We supplement that with an occasional goat, the odd duck, and beef from either of our butchers who raise their own. Our three large chest freezers are usually well stocked. We’re not sure where we went wrong this year but somehow, for the first time in at least half a decade, by mid-January we ran out of meat. We entered the “hungry months” of late winter to early spring when fresh, local produce is scarce to non-existent, with empty freezers and zero food stores. This is an uncomfortable experience for someone who likes to keep a well stocked pantry, but true to the natural, seasonal rhythm of famine and feast.
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For a couple of months we lived on cheap cuts of beef stewed with winter veg as we could get them—turnips (actually swedes, rutabagas for my friends across the pond, but we call them turnips), carrots, parsnips, onions, potatoes—with lashings of butter, and a glut of duck eggs since our ducks came into lay mid February—a Godsend when there wasn’t much else available which has mercifully now slowed to a trickle as the season rolls on into fresh greens, strawberries and cream in proper order of the true seasonality of food. Our ducks, living outdoors and free to roam, with no artificial lighting to force laying year-round, lay madly through spring—there are days when we get more eggs than there are ducks to lay them—until they deem their nests are full enough; several are now sitting on their nests and hiss at me ferociously if I try to steal their eggs and I just caught sight of a fluffy little duckling this morning. And when we couldn’t get things like onions or potatoes anymore, we did without. Grains don’t grow well down around this wet part of the country, so we never had bread or cereals, nor pulses or beans. We don’t eat that kind of thing anyway so it wasn’t missed, but it’s a good thing we’re not vegan.
We never went without local meat or dairy and would have happily lived carnivorously (as we have done before and will likely do through the “hungry months” next winter with a bit more preparation), but, mostly down to our own lack of basic organisation, kitchen facility or food storage and our distance from shops and markets out in the sticks here, buying meat day-to-day by the cut without other foods to bulk our meals out became prohibitively difficult and expensive, especially as we came into spring—the busiest and most demanding season for me on the farm and for Husband at work when the temptation for convenience is strongest. That’s our excuse for expanding our thirty-five mile radius to the whole of Ireland for the final month or so of our challenge. Which gave us heavenly morsels like mushrooms to sauté with our butter and beef, and early strawberries to swirl into thick, yellow, spring cream from the local dairy farm whose cows just went out to pasture.
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I had the unfortunate experience of having to buy meat day-to-day, by the cut, combined with the even more unfortunate experience of navigating a supermarket (can never find anything to eat in those places without the added onus of it having to be local or at least Irish grown). We left without any meat because I found the labelling “slaughtered and cut in Ireland” but not “raised in Ireland” highly suspect. And it didn’t look very good. I can see why people choose to be vegetarian when the supermarket is the only option (it’s never the only option, just the easy option). We’ll stick to our local butchers whose beef we can see grazing their fields on Sunday night before it’s slaughtered a short walk across the yard on Monday at the quiet little on-farm abattoir by the same hands that fed it for the past three years. We butchered a couple of sheep that, coming out of winter, weren’t quite as fat as we’d like them but we needed the meat. We normally aim to butcher sheep and buy our beef to stock our freezers for the year in autumn and early winter, when they’re fat on the summer’s grass and before grass growth stalls through deep winter, hay feeding starts and everything naturally leans out a bit. Beef killed in the winter or spring will have been finished indoors on grain. We can taste the difference and we don’t like it. And if we’re going to be particular about what we feed ourselves then we’d better also be looking at the foods we feed our food (but that’s a whole other essay’s worth).
Eating locally isn’t just about supporting our community. It isn’t just about eating the seasonal foods that nourish our bodies in alignment with the climate and the land we live on. It is all those things, yes, but it is also getting involved with our food production and supply chains, closing the gap between producer and consumer; it is taking back control of our food systems, our health, and our land.
For all of its challenges (I mean, it was meant to be a challenge), we are coming out of our year of eating local stronger and more inspired in our conviction that we (personally and we as a country) can and should be growing the vast bulk of our own foods—as farmers and communities, growing local foods for local people. If you’re still sold on the lie that we need Big Ag and global food trade to feed the world, check out the work of Gunnar Rundgren and Chris Smaje, for a start. Also, not food or farming related per se but a brilliant and relevant deep dive into global economics and the mess we’ve made of the world through commodifying our natural resources including land and food production, Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics. It doesn't make any sense that we export our beef, butter and sheep meat across the world and then import German and UK beef and New Zealand lamb to stock our own supermarkets, or that we allocate so much of our arable land to dairy for the export market while importing basic, easily grown staples like onions and carrots, or that we ship in soy to feed the beef and dairy that we ship out, unless you’re sitting at the top of the commodity food chain reaping all the profits.
We’re inspired to grow much, much more of our own food (which has always been our aim and what we’ve been living and working toward in various forms, and achieving in various degrees, over the years). We’ve come up with all sorts of plans and lists of delicious treats and basic staples we can grow but are often near to impossible to find grown locally, or even grown in Ireland, besides in very limited seasonal quantities. Not because they’re hard to grow here, but because it’s somehow cheaper and more profitable for whoever it is that profits from keeping us so disconnected and dependent to ship in produce from elsewhere. Spring salads from Morocco. Fresh chives from Ethiopia (in a plastic box to keep them uniformly straight). You can grow those in a pot on a windowsill with so little effort a small child could do it—there really is no excuse. It’s good to see little community gardens and CSAs sprouting up and I really hope they take off and flourish. With community support, they will. If you want to see changes in our food and farming systems, if you want to access locally grown produce and have a say in how and where and by whom your food is grown, then get involved. Join a CSA. Grow a pot of chives on your windowsill. Go to the farmer’s market. Visit a local farm. Talk to farmers. Find a local butcher’s shop. I’d also love to see more farmers and landowners feeding local communities instead of catering to the fragile demands of the export market—but there has to be people who will buy their produce and support them.
Anyway, going forward from our year of eating local, we intend to continue in much the same vein. As I said at the start of the challenge, we’ve been eating predominantly homegrown and local for years—but as shown by our lack of preparedness this winter it would have been all too easy when things got difficult to slide down the slippery slope of convenience had we not committed to the year. On our farm, we will be making some changes to how and what we raise with our focus on growing the majority (we estimate about ninety percent) of the foods for our own household. There will naturally be some surplus to share and trade with our community and some things we can’t or don’t want to grow ourselves that we need. For those things we will continue to source as locally as possible. Maybe we’ll occasionally have some of those incredible French cheeses and cured meats they bring in to the dairy shop down the road—luxuries, not staples. There will gradually be less sheep on our farm, replaced with some other livestock, things we like to eat (pigs, chickens, geese, and of course our growing little goat herd) and ground set aside for tree-planting, food orchards, and plenty of space for the wild.
Our commitment is to our health, our land, and ensuring ourselves a sovereign food supply—the three are inextricably interwoven, threads of the same fabric. And yes, that means sometimes limiting our choices, experiencing scarcity in attunement with the land we live on and then revelling in seasonal abundance; eating stored turnips and meat stews in February, sun-ripened strawberries with fresh, yellow cream in June.
I read this and wondered if I would be competent enough to do what you and Hubs are doing. But that is the point, isn't it? The Man Behind the Curtain wants us to be scared of everything, including ourselves, and so trains us to fear our own incapacity instead of appreciating our immense power.
All that being said, you are a pure pioneer, and settlers such as myself are sure to follow your example in one form or another, as our specific circumstances permit. I believe this because obviously, this separation of dependency and self-sufficiency the curtain boundaries is falling.
Of course it will depend on your local situation, but I find that a total self-sufficiency in most cases is misplaced and untenable, apart from the pure culinary gaps. Some local exchange build dependency and cooperation. To produce, say 70% of the food you eat yourself and get 25% from the local communities and the last 5% from the commercial trade is a reasonable balance in my view. In our place, we produce organic meat, vegetables, potaties, fruits, berries and pick mushrooms and berries in thw woods, and we have all kinds of processed products from them (cider, wine, cordials, sausages, tallow, preserves, pickles etc) but buy dairy from locals. Grain products are partly from the market (pasta, rice) and partly from local grain taken to a small mill or from an regional mill. Eggs is bought locally, but it is likely our next project. And then there is coffee, wine, tea.....I haven't calculated it, but I guess more than 50% of what we eat is from the farm, most of the rest is local/regional and perhaps 15% is (super)market goods. The stuff from the supermarket is almost all organic, the local food is varying, many smaller producers are not really organic. those with eggs often buy market feed and some are organic but not certified.
Thanks for recommending my blog btw!