I was a personal chef and caterer for the past 12 years. But when this latest recession very nearly put me out of business, I decided it was time to take a good, long look at my life and career choices and 'find my true passion'. That passion turned out to be something I was already doing, but not on a grand scale: preparing locally grown food from less than 100 miles away. There are so many benefits to eating locally grown food that I decided that, as soon as the weather allows, my children and I would begin preparations for a small vegetable and herb garden. The more I researched these ideas the more I came to realize that this adventure isn't just a resourceful way to save money...it has the power to create a food revolution. Imagine it if you will. Entire neighborhood blocks once again teeming with small backyard gardens and fruit trees and neighbors sharing the 'fruits of their labors' amongst each other. Not just in the rural aeas, but EVERYWHERE!


And perhaps it is a tad bit unrealistic, and perhaps I'm an incurable idealist, but the very idea of American families once again having a direct connection with their food has me incredibly excited. Not to mention the impact it would have on lowering overall carbon emissions if our food was no longer being trucked in from thousands of miles away. And okay, so perhaps the bigger picture reveals some potential financial hurdles for the massive agricultural business in our country, but if we can learn to become self-sufficient on an individual level then I feel certain that these massive corporations will no doubt learn to revamp and resize their operations in response to Americans waning need of their products. Speaking of products, let's take a brief look at what we'd be missing if we gave up eating pre-packaged, pesticide laden, irradiated food stuffs. No more cheap, fast food hamburgers. *sigh* But, this would immediately translate into a lower sodium intake, lower saturated fat intake, decreased consumption of trigycerides and if you're like most people you also order a soft drink of some sort to wash that burger down. So, eliminating just one softdrink a day is essentially the same as eliminating 10 tablespoons of sugar (in this case it's almost always high fructose corn syrup) per day, which translates into 150 kcalories per day. One pound of body fat is 3,500 kcalories...or, about 23 soft drinks. That's a little over a pound of sugar based body fat every single month! And let's not even start on the french fries...eeek!


So, beginning January 1, 2010 I and my family of four (16 year old son and 8 year old girl/boy twins) will begin researching local food vendors and making preparations for a year of eating only locally grown foods. We ought to be able to begin our own garden sometime in May (the ground is often still frozen for the first week) and I'm looking into some helpful guides to insure some modicum of success. I also plan to invest in a local C.S.A. (community supported agriculture) to round out the foodstuffs we can't grow or somehow manage to kill off. I suppose this means that our actual year of eating only locally grown food can't really begin until the growing season begins. And once we reach that point there will be plenty of preparations to make in order to continue eating locally throughout the following winter months, which usually start in early to mid-October! That's not much of a growing season, but we're determined to try our best. In the mean time, between January 1, 2010 and May 15, 2010, I have my work cut out for me with trying to locate and secure local sources of poultry (unless we courageously decide to try our own hand at raising a few chickens!), eggs, wild game and/or red meat, milk and cheese. I know how to make homemade yogurt and soft cheeses and even learned how to milk a cow back in Pennsylvania many years ago...but my fair city doesn't take kindly to harboring bovines in one's own backyard.


Just to make things slightly more complicated there is the fact that we're not exactly wealthy!  On the bright side, however, my children love home made meals and are at least somewhat adventurous (due to years of setting my 'experiments' down in front of them with the expectations that they'll actually eat them).  Now, once we get this whole thing up and running it will save us a lot of money, not just on food but also on medical bills...but we'll have to spend more on things like eggs, milk, poultry, meat, etc. unless I can work out some sort of a trade with the vendors. It'll be worth a shot, but there are no guarantees. Anyway, please feel free to join us on this year long adventure that will actually be more like an 18 month adventure due to spending the first 5 months doing research and making contacts. I'll not only post information on WHO I find to help provide us with those foods we can't grow on our own, but I'll also provide recipes and feedback from my kiddo's as well as how much money we're spending/saving. So, let's go loco! Er...I mean, local.

Kryssa Wilmer
Bozeman, Montana (Zone 4)

"We are indeed much more than what we eat, but what we eat can nevertheless help us to be much more than what we are."
-Adelle Davis

Food means many things to many people and sadly, in our culture, it often means grabbing whatever is quick and/or cheap and shoveling it into our mouths and down to our bellies without even a seconds worth of consideration.  There are so many questions many of us simply don't take the time to ask about our food, and we can't answer what we fail to ask.  I may not have all the answers, but I do know that cooking for someone is one the most intimate things we can do for each other.  For me, every aspect of creating a beautiful meal is about love, passion and commitment.  From the tiny grains of barley to the tender, heirloom lettuces and succulent meats there is an underlying theme of devotion. 

Being able to share an actual connection with the source of our ingredients elevates our culinary experience to new heights.  "New" is perhaps a bit misleading as we've only truly lost that connection in the last half century as a society.  Preparing meals for the 2007 Bioneers Confernece here in Bozeman, Montana has been quite the eye-opening experience!  When I first agreed to head up the catering team I was told that we wanted the ingredients to come from our immediate bio-region.  "Yeah!” I thought.  "This will be a fabulous challenge.  Let's get started".  Well, little did I realize at the time that in order to pull this off we would, in fact, have to "get started" right away.  That was in early August.

You see, I realized that if I was going to prepare four separate meals using only local ingredients ... that fed 325 people each... over the course of three days... in late October...in Bozeman, Montana (!), well, I'd better get a move on NOW before the growing season is all but a distant memory. 

So, the first ingredient ready for harvest was Basil.  Twenty-five pounds of basil, to be precise.  I spent the better half of a week stripping leaves from stems, soaking, spinning, drying and chopping basil.  We found out a few weeks later that the local farmer's remaining crop of basil had been destroyed by that unexpected cold spell in early September.  *eeek*

Basil has a lovely aroma, which is a good thing as there is still definite Eau du Basil permeating my kitchen 2 1/2 months later!  And if I thought twenty-five pounds of basil was an olfactory challenge it was nothing compared to the next ingredient that was ready to harvest. 

Garlic.  A grand total of fifteen pounds of garlic needing to be peeled and packed, or peeled and chopped and packed or roasted, peeled and chopped and packed.  I was unable to scare up any sort of human contact for about a week after prepping out so much garlic! My own children begged me NOT to tuck them in to bed at night for a good 5 days. 

Then came the tomatoes…washing, coring and quartering then slow oven-roasting twenty-five pounds of tomatoes, which in the end only gave us about 4 gallons.  *sigh*

Plums were next on our list.  Fortunately I had friends, acquaintances and newly found comrades all begging me to take a few pounds of plums off their hands.  Apparently the little buggers can create quite a mess if not picked when ripe-- early September.  An accurate weight measurement would be difficult to gauge, but after washing, pitting, cooking, pureeing and putting through a hand cranked food mill, then a cheese cloth lined strainer, I ended up with about 18 quarts of plum juice.  Not bad, eh?

 Then it was time for the apples, which Lori, my co-chef-in-arms, hand picked herself!  Four days later we had 24 quarts of washed, cored and sliced apples!  Whew...we're on a roll now, I thought.  I'd better hurry up and start the apple cider vinegar so I can then make the homemade mustard for the juniper infused, plum-mustard glaze we'd be using for the roasted pork loin  dinner on Saturday night.

In any case, nearly every single *ingredient used in these meals came from our immediate Bio-region, and those ingredients that we couldn't find already prepared locally (like mustard and apple cider vinegar) were made by us prior to the conference.  Because we've formed a connection to all this food, as well as the gardeners, farmers and ranchers that lovingly nourished the food we used, we now have a palpable bond formed with you, the diner.


*Salt and pepper came from outside of our bio-region, though mined salt is available through Bingham, Utah.