Beef and Butter, Strawberries and Cream

our year of eating local

Strawberry season is upon us.

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…