Buy Local

There are so many trends these days with regard to the foods we should and should not eat. Trends toward organic, raw, whole, all natural, gluten-free, vegan, homegrown, grain-fed, free range, pesticide/hormone-free foods have gotten people into a veritable frenzy. It's difficult to even go grocery shopping without tremendous guilt from the time you enter the door until you leave. If I take my items to the checkout counter, and I put hormone-injected chicken up there next to organic peanut butter, I look like a fool. You can't just put one good thing next to a bad thing... they negate each other. It's simple math.

*SIDEBAR* So, here I am enjoying this very delicious red wine, wondering to myself, "Why isn't this post writing itself right now?" I could write a post just on the benefits of red wine... and now getting back to my point:

All of the guilt associated with purchasing food has gotten completely out of control. I'd be remiss if I didn't admit that, YES, I do buy organic, hormone-free, free range chicken... and YES, I smile a little bigger when I'm buying nitrate & nitrite-free all beef hotdogs... and YES, I drink organic milk because I think it tastes so much better... BUT I'm not one of the devout and faithful members of the "I can only eat THIS food because all the other foods are EVIL" clan. I just like what I like.

There is something, though, that I do strive to do more of... and that is to buy local. Now, there are people who are inclined to go crazy with any idea such as this one, but this is not a call to hysteria. Rather, it's more of a "let's think about the benefits of this and then participate in little ways when practical and possible."

So, here's where this is coming from. I grew up in a fishing community. I don't mean like, "there's a bit of fish here." I mean, all of my friends' dads were commercial fishermen, my neighbors were commercial fishermen, my parents had lots of friends who were commercial fishermen, and I'm surprised no one in my family was a commercial fisherman. Then again, my family was the only non-Catholic family in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, so we were a little different... but I digress. There be some seafood in this little corner of the planet, I tells you. Crabs, shrimp, crawfish, oysters, bass, trout, sac-au-lait, redfish, catfish... you name it... it's here. And believe me, there is more than enough to go around. So when I lived in Memphis during those 6 years after Hurricane Katrina, it made me sad to not have the access to that seafood to which we'd grown so accustomed all of our lives. Then one day I went to the grocery store and was just perusing the seafood case... and I saw boiled crawfish. I was too shocked! I got a little excited for a minute... and then I saw it:

This made me infinitely sad.

Here we were, a mere 6 hours from the Gulf coast, where seafood such as this abounds, and this grocery chain was shipping in crawfish from China?? How absurd is that?! I can't even begin to imagine a scenario in which that would be ok. Are Chinese crawfish really that much less expensive? Can you even justify stealing money from American fishermen because you get crawfish cheaper from another continent? This, I feel, is insanity. Don't buy seafood from China. Buy seafood from the place down the street, please. It tastes better anyway. Trust me.

Anyhoo, another thing that I like to buy locally, and for an entirely different reason, is honey. Honey is an amazing substance anywhere, but when purchased locally, not only are you supporting a local apiary, but you're also supporting your immune system! See, the bees use the pollens that are indigenous to your area, so when they make the honey and some of those pollens get mixed in, and you eat it, you could be alleviating allergy symptoms with a natural type of immunotherapy. :) This isn't a proven fact, but you can read and decide for yourself. And if you aren't won over, just consider that there's no harm anyway in supporting your local food producer anyhow.