what do you eat in january? 305costs about the same as dinner for four in a good restaurant, and lasts
2,800 times as long. Local onions and Ginger Gold apples at the same
market cost less than the potatoes, and the same or less than their trans-
ported counterparts at a nearby Whole Foods.
It doesn’t cost a fortune, in other words. Nor does it require a pickup
truck, or a calico bonnet. Just the unique belief that summer is the right
time to go to the fresh market with cash in hand and say to some vendors:
I’ll take all you have. It’s an entirely reasonable impulse, to stock up on
what’s in season. Most of my farming and gardening friends do it. Else-
where, Aesop is history. Grasshoppers rule, ants drool.
/Three-quarters of the way through our locavore year, the process was
becoming its own reward for us. We were jonesing for a few things, cer-
tainly, including time off: occasionally I clanged dirty pot lids together in
frustration and called kitchen strikes. But more often than not, dinner-
time called me into the kitchen for the comfort of predictable routines, as
respite from the baked- on intellectual residue of work and life that is in-
evitably messier than pots and pans. In a culture that assigns nil prestige
to domestic work, I usually self- deprecate when anyone comments on my
gardening and cooking- from-scratch lifestyle. I explain that I have to do
something brainless to unwind from my work, and I don’t like TV. But the
truth is, I enjoy this so-called brainless work. I like the kind of family I can
raise on this kind of food.
Still, what kind of person doesn’t ask herself at the end of a hard day’s
work: Was it worth it? Maybe because of the highly documented status of
our experiment, I now felt compelled to quantify the work we had done in
terms that would translate across the culture gap—i.e., moolah. I had
kept detailed harvest records in my journal. Now I sat at my desk and
added up columns.
Between April and November, the full cash value of the vegetables,
chickens, and turkeys we’d raised and harvested was $4,410. To get this
figure I assigned a price to each vegetable and the poultry per pound on
the basis of organic equivalents (mostly California imports) in the nearest
retail outlet where they would have been available at the time we’d har-