The third shift: What it really takes to eat local

You’ll have to forgive me for skipping last night’s daily report. I needed a break from the blogosphere after all the excitement, so I watched the Giants game and made dinner with a friend. Of course, we ended up talking about local food all night, while making a delicious dinner (food is pretty much life, so it’s hard to turn it off even for an evening).

After publishing the last post, “7 ways to access affordable, healthy food in Mendocino County (and why the SF Chronicle was dead wrong,” our blog traffic was astronomical (for us): 1,240 visitors and 1,737 views on Monday alone. That is equivalent to what we usually attract in a week!

It was an adrenaline rush to see such a huge response to the article, and to spark so much important discourse about accessing healthy food in Mendocino County. Thank you to everyone who engaged with the article through sharing it, commenting, and pondering it. It wasn’t possible for us to deal with the constant stream of feedback, as it was Monday and Gowan and I both had to work our day jobs, run errands like normal people, plus breed a goat that suddenly went into heat. The days are very, very full, and this project is like a third job for both of us. In spite of the fact that our article made some majorly positive waves, I have to admit that I felt a little bit defeated by some of the comments yesterday, which basically accused us of being bourgeoisie white girls who don’t know what it’s like to live dollar to dollar. Let me just say that we do, we really do.

For me, this last year has been extremely revealing, as I’ve struggled with the constant stresses of trying to find right livelihood in this county and embarked on the largest undertaking of my life – eating local for a year. Additionally, I nearly lost my life in a car accident which I was fortunately able to walk away from, but has left me carless. For almost four months, I have been recovering from a serious injury to my pelvis, running my own business, managing the Mendocino Farmers’ Market, plus cooking every single thing I eat from scratch and writing about it on our blog and Facebook page. (I will admit, my sink is often piled with dishes again – the zen kitchen routine I achieved in the first few months of this project has been disrupted. Oh well, life is messy.). And, all of this without a car in a rural area with severely limited transportation. It’s gotten real. Life has been stripped down to the bones, and what matters has never been more clear.

I don’t love writing about the vulnerable edges of this experience. I would prefer to talk about how to make kim chee, or show the stunning abundance we have invited into our lives through this journey to get closer to our food. Ok, on that note, I will share a picture of last night’s dessert because beauty is always nearby and it’s important to remember that.

But, I understand that this angle of the story is also really important to tell. We are not two trend-seeking girls who decided to play Martha Stewart for a year and show everyone how cute it is to eat local. This project was borne out of our deep hunger to transform this community’s relationship with food. Our goal has always been to inspire through doing it, educating people by showing them how, and opening up new pathways for change by showing the gaps in the food system that need to be addressed. We want to be the faces of what’s possible, but we are staring the truth right in the face. We understand the poverty and severe food insecurity that exist in this community. Gowan grows food for the most vulnerable in the population: public school students who are on the free/reduced lunch program in Fort Bragg (which, to underscore, is a whopping 70% of the student population). I ride the bus with many people bound for Safeway or the Food Bank and listen to them talk about every single thing that the SF Chronicle article was trying to say – the main topics of conversation are the cost of everything, the lack of work, and a multitude of health problems. We really get it.

The reality is both bleak and promising and the juxtaposition is never lost on us. We have chosen to do this project because this is the best way we know how to start building a better, and more just food system right now, with our own hands. There are some really hard moments. Sometimes we are living jar to jar, and making pretty hard decisions about how we balance our time and resources to feed ourselves and also pay the rent and keep telling our story so that others can actually benefit from it. At times, this has been an inherently lonely undertaking, we are so far outside of the system that a lot of normal life routines have been completely overturned. This has also opened up doors to so many new people, relationships, opportunities and places that we have never, ever doubted that this was exactly what we are supposed to be doing right now, even when it’s almost midnight, and I still need to make yogurt and finish a project for a client. This is what I call the “Third Shift.” (This is also one of the reasons that it is hard to date a locavore.) In the last seven and a half months, whether I was laying in bed nursing my back, or spending four hours round-trip to take the bus to Fort Bragg to get some veggies from Gowan, I have never once thought, “Am I really going to eat local today?”

So thanks to each of you, for joining us on this journey and listening to what we have to say and believing that it is worth hearing. It means everything; you are why we’re doing it.

So much love,

Sarah