100-Foot Diet Meal of the Week

This week's 100-foot diet meal was creamed eggs on toast with a side of asparagus.

• Eggs--from our chickens.
  
• Milk--from our goats.
  
• Bread--homemade with non-local flour. (I have to choose between grinding my own non-local wheat or buying local whole wheat flour. This time we chose the former.)
• Sprinkled with paprika from a canister which, frighteningly, has been in my cupboard for at least ten years.
  
• Asparagus--not local but seasonal, at least.
• In the basket are pansies potted by a friend.

We're eating a lot of eggs these days. That's because there isn't much else to eat around here right now, and our frozen and canned food supplies are getting low. At the rate we're going, the lettuce seedlings I started indoors are going to be big enough to eat before we're able to get them in the garden.

While I'm passionate about the importance of eating local, I'm not a purist. This time of year makes me grateful that we do have options--that I can supplement our diet with an occasional bag of oranges, fair trade bananas, or early asparagus. The infrastructure is just not here to supply a completely local diet year-round, unless you grow most of it yourself. We're not all the way there yet, so in the meanwhile, we'll just keep celebrating the local meals we do have and trying to stretch our gardening season a little further each year.