When I got home late last night, Tricia had put my first food in my fridge. Talk about service. And a loving note on my counter.
I woke full of curiosty. How will this go? The first challenge out of the gate: milk for tea. I haven’t set up my weekly half gallon from my local cow yet. I don’t expect Tricia-like deliveries. I do need go right to the source, so to speak. This cow is in my 10 miles. But I knew my friendly neighbor would have some 10-mile milk from her source so I broke one more “don’t ask” barrier of PNW social reserve and called. Before I could get something decent on over my nightgown she was at the door with a pint of the most delicious milk.
So goes another lesson of 10-mile eating. You have to be in relationship to pull it off. You can’t “just go to the store” and pay some US dollars and skulk home with nary a conversation. And in relationship, you have to be vulnerable. To get your needs met, you have to say what they are. And risk getting turned down. And stay in relationship anyway.
So this diet isn’t just what goes into my mouth. It’s strengthening the web I am part of.
Coming posts:
What’s for breakfast?
The problem with local milk
Stories from my past forays into local living, including:
- butchering 2 dear (who were eating our Rhinelander WI garden)
- butchering the pig we found in the woods as a piglet, fed our scraps, called Piggy Sue and shot in the Fall for winter food
- butcher rabbits, a racoon, a woodchuck, chickens and becoming an ethical eater
- making wine in garbage pails in the woods out of the juice from boiling garden beets from canning – and it tasting like fine port.
- drinking our way around the back-woods neighborhood as the locals plied us with dandelion wine, corn wine and mead (honey wine).
- eating fiddle ferns and cattail tubers and being glad I didn’t have to survive on them
- grinding sphagnum moss (we lived in a cranberry bog) with a food mill hooked to our roto-tiller to mulch the garden
- getting end rolls of plastic from a local cracker factory to cover the garden on nights we predicted frost (it was Northern Wisconsin, two seasons, winter and 4th of July)
- living on $100 a month for years as I learned to live off what grew around me or was tossed at the dump