CHOICES – Every day we make thousands of them. They range from “what time am I going to wake up” to “what am I going to eat for dinner.”

ADVENTURE – Every day in the kitchen can be one of those. As I peer into the cabinets and the refrigerator, I’m on the lookout for what is going to pop up and say “Choose Me! Choose Me!” Sometimes it hard to distinguish if the vegetable is calling or it’s my stomach – but really, either one works. I especially enjoy using this technique while perusing the stalls at the Farmers’ Market.

Choosing an Adventure in the Kitchen
Thanksgiving is a time for adventure in the kitchen and choices in the marketplace. For the past three years, the Green Fork project has sponsored a 100-Mile Thanksgiving Celebration during which all of the food that we served was grown and/or processed within 100 miles of Palo Alto. This event was a springboard to inspire and educate the community about the choices that each of us has every time we eat and every time we purchase food. To help you make your own choices and start your adventures easily, Green Fork provides these resources to the community:

• Recipes – these recipes are perfect for the holidays, and they use local, seasonal ingredients! No summer squash here!
• Local Food Source Guide – here’s a guide with information on where to purchase various local ingredients.

If Not You Then Who, If Not Now Then When
In our evolution from food consumers into food citizens – people who make conscious choices about food – it’s helpful to look inward and think about our personal barriers to change. What makes it difficult to change a food habit? I think inertia is a big issue. Changing from the status quo to something new is always hard. One of the Permaculture principles is “Start small, then expand”. Start out with one new choice – a choice for local and seasonal where you weren’t already doing that. Over time, add another and another. As you plan for your holiday meals, think about choice and think about adventure.

• Choose to purchase food from a local Farmers’ Market. The food is fresh, local, and seasonal. In addition, money that’s spent in the local economy stays in the local economy and supports the continued existence of local farms.
• Choose to purchase some food that you don’t normally think of as “local” such as olive oil, sauerkraut, pickled vegetables, milk, cheese, turkey, jam, nuts, dried beans, and flour.
• Choose adventure. Try something that you’ve never tried before. Try a different type of winter squash. Try a food that you’ve never seen before. Try a food that you’ve heard of but never tasted.
• Choose to create a Thanksgiving dinner from local food --- maybe it’s one of your dishes, maybe it’s all the dishes.

Healthy Food, Healthy Holidays

We are blessed to live in an area with year round seasonal abundance of fresh and local food, productive, healthy land, and farmers and farm workers who tend to the soil, the seeds, and the growing plants. Before sitting down to eat every meal, I spend a moment in quiet reflection, grateful for mother earth, the air, the water, the pollinators, the soil biology, the seeds, the farmers, the farm workers, the food, and all who made it possible for the food that I’m about to eat to reach my plate. As we come up to a holiday season which centers on food, we have an incredible opportunity to make change in our local food system. People eat a lot of vegetables during the holidays. Whole Foods parks refrigerated trucks in the parking lot to store the extra produce that they’re going to sell. What if everyone ate that many fresh vegetables all year round? A shift like that starts at the individual level and moves through communities one at a time. We’ve seen that shift  reflected by the rise in successful Farmers’ Markets in communities around the country.

Make a Choice When you wake up tomorrow, make a choice.

Choose local!

Choose seasonal!

Choose fresh!

Choose for this holiday season and beyond into the new year!

by Susan Osofsky