Finding locally grown food on a budget

What to do when finding local food is not convenient? In Philadelphia, being green, eating green and living green are messages transmitted on buses, trains and signs all over. But how does the average Philadelphia resident who does not live in Center City eat a meal that way did not originate half way around the globe? What about those who love rice, pasta, avocados, bananas or anything else tropical? They will need more than good luck and a city dining guide to find those items with Pennsylvania birth certificates.

Fortunately, we are not without hope in this city. Some grocery stores and restaurants do their part to offer at least some portion of food from a New Jersey or Pennsylvania farm or artisan. But really how local is local? One hundred miles away? Five hundred miles away? Perhaps the entire mid-Atlantic region? According to the colorful Whole Foods Market brochures, in their stores a local item has traveled less than seven hours to reach the store and, in the case of produce, the item is in season.

The next piece of the puzzle is price. When the weekly food budget is sixty dollars, are local options affordable? When a person is a on a tight budget, buying pricey artisan jam or hydroponically grown lettuce can be hard to rationalize.

Even on a tight budget, I challenged myself last week to make sure that the majority of my groceries originated first in Pennsylvania and then anywhere else above Virginia. My first stop, our nearest store, Whole Foods Market.

Also known as Whole Paycheck by folks in my neighborhood, Whole Foods Market offers some local goods for similar prices found at Path Mark and other grocery stores around the city. On this trip to WFM, I took home enough Pennsylvania gala apples, red beets, napa cabbage, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, Virginia green beans and Kennett Square cremini mushrooms to last me for the week and I still had about thirty dollars left to spend. What to do about eggs, beans, tomatoes, bread, rice and the other items I eat? Someone in Pennsylvania must produce these things!

The eggs with the most vibrant orange yolks I have ever seen come from chickens near Gap, PA and are available at Reading Terminal. But getting there meant taking a bus. Plus they tend to be about two dollars more expensive than the standard brown ones at WFM. Realizing that I would not be reported to the local food police for buying generic brown eggs at Whole Foods, I calmly resolved to buy my eggs and other staples from there as well to save myself a bus ride. In the equation for green living, conserving transportation resources is also important, right?

Local eating on a budget in this city requires a balancing act. Because finding the food can be inconvenient and occasionally it is more expensive, some months my groceries are seventy-five percent local and other times Pennsylvania goods make up a mere twenty-five percent. Last month, I could afford to buy butter from Lancaster County grass-fed cow’s milk for seven dollars a pound. This week, not quite. But at least my sweet potatoes came from a county less than one hundred miles away.

As I left the store, I beamed with pride that I kept my purchases to sixty-dollars and all of the produce came from the mid-Atlantic region. Yes, my basmati rice hailed from California and the black beans probably started in Central American soil, but would either food grow along the east of coast of the United States? Probably not.

Although I was pleased with my hunt for local food, I still wanted to take a look at the offerings at Reading Terminal and Greensgrow Farm but my money and my energy was spent.

When all the groceries found their place in my kitchen, I had to decide what to make. Apple pie? Steamed cabbage? Maybe not. Minimum preparation time is always of great importance in my household. With my modest kitchen tools, a knife and a cutting board, I made a spicy fall vegetable chili that lasted through the week. To sweetened up morning oatmeal I simmered cranberries and gala apples in homemade light caramel sauce. The mushrooms found their way into two soups: seaweed mushroom soup and puree of potatoes with mushrooms, green beans and smoked salt.

My local foods shopping trip only consisted of Whole Foods Market, but the important mission of finding local goods was met. Now, if I can just get that snazzy new bike with a basket, I can really be a green Philadelphia person, conserving fossil fuel energy on my grocery trips. I can even make my way to Reading Terminal for those eggs with the bright yolks. On the way there, I’ll just have to be careful of the cars speeding through the bike lanes. After all, I am in Philadelphia.