what do you eat in january? 307emergencies; boxes of mac- and-cheese. Both my kids have had beloved
friends who would eat nothing, literally, except macaroni and cheese out
of a certain kind of box. I didn’t want anybody to perish on my watch.
Still, our grocery- store bill for the year was a small fraction of what it
had been the year before, and most of it went for regionally produced
goods we had sleuthed out in our supermarket: cider vinegar, milk, butter,
cheese, and wines, all grown and processed in Virginia. About $100 a
month went to our friends at the farmers’ market for the meats and vege-
tables we purchased there. The market would now be closed for the rest
of our record- keeping year, so that figure was deceptively high, including
all the stocking up we’d done in the fall. In cash, our year of local was
costing us well under 50¢ per meal. Add the $1.72-per-meal credit for the
vegetables we grew, and it’s still a bargain. We were saving tons of money
by eating, in every sense, at home.
Our goal had not really been to economize, only to exercise some con-
trol over which economy we would support. We were succeeding on both
counts. If we’d had to purchase all our vegetables as most households do,
instead of pulling them out of our back forty, it would still be a huge
money-saver to shop in our new fashion, starting always with the farmers’
market and organizing meals from there. I know some people will never
believe that. It’s too easy to see the price of a locally grown tomato or
melon and note that it’s higher (usually) than the conventionally grown,
imported one at the grocery. It’s harder to see, or perhaps to admit, that all
those ntp panda pffs do add up. The big savings come from a habit of
organizing meals that don’t include pricey processed additions.
In some objective and measurable ways, we could see that our hard
work had been worth the trouble. But the truth is we did it for other rea-
sons, largely because it wasn’t our day job. Steven and I certainly could
have earned more money by putting our farming hours into teaching more
classes or meeting extra deadlines, using skills that our culture rewards
and respects much more than food production and processing. Camille
could have done the same via more yoga classes and hours at her other
jobs. Lily was the only one of us, probably, who was maximizing her earn-
ing potential through farm labor.
But spending every waking hour on one job is drudgery, however you