Day 2: Eating Local

Today was not as bad nor as exciting as yesterday in terms of eating local meals. For lunch today, I took three hard boiled eggs and an apple to class. Unfortunately, I did not have time in between classes to go the Fine Arts Café, where I should hopefully find another source of local food. From what Elizabeth and Michael tell me, it sounds like a local food haven. In the meantime, I checked out the Pavilion to see if they had any products made with just local food. Unfortunately, most of the staff did not understand what I meant by “local food” and I decided not to take any risks eating their products if they were not locally produced. Overall, I didn’t have too much a problem in eating local food, although I am getting tired of eating eggs and apples. For a change in dinner tonight, I made steak that was raised locally in Virginia. I also ate salad with dressing from Virginia and lettuce picked at a farm nearby. I also found out that as expected, none of the convenience stores in the area carry locally made products (big surprise there).
Since my camera is still not working and I can’t load pictures from my cell phone onto the computer, I will have to wait another day to load up pictures of my meals. Tomorrow I am planning another trip to Whole Foods and Harris Teeter to see if I can find more of a variety of local food items. So far, the problem hasn’t been in finding local food, but rather finding a variety of different foods that I won’t get sick of. It seems as though I have become too reliant on the convenience of grocery stores just providing whatever food I want. However, this lack of variety in local food is something that was discussed in our STS class today. We also discussed if there was a middle ground solution to eating purely local foods or eating imported food. Hopefully through this project I can find some sort of a balance or compromise, at least in my daily diet. I might also want to carry this experiment over into the next week in terms of finding a viable economic balance between local goods and a convenient diet. Sorry for the short and boring post today, hopefully I will have some more exciting experiences tomorrow.
P.S. Here is a link to a new article about group trying to make local food more accessible. I find these movements and efforts interesting, especially since they might be able to help with my project.
http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S=11429377
-Avik