Every day I take a few minutes to venture out to my scrap of a garden where I clip a few sprigs of parsley or fresh herbs to season or garnish a stew or salad and some chard or kale leaves for our daily greens.  There’s something about growing at least a little of your own food,  nurturing a plant or participating in the miracle of starting some from seeds, that slows you down and connects you to the earth and the world of living green. The fragrance, flavor and intimacy of eating food you’ve tended and just plucked from the earth, adds vibrancy to meals.  It’s also a recipe for increasing feelings of abundance and gratitude.

The Thanksgiving turkey, that I got from the young Willcox farmer who raised it on fresh green pasture, was so good that I cooked one again for our Christmas feast.  The fresh sage, which I sniffed while picking, then crumbled into the dressing and sprinkled around the bird, was so aromatic that it filled the kitchen for hours with its scent.

This year I also got to forage for more desert foods.  Last spring I learned how to twist off the ripe buds of certain cholla cactus which when boiled taste like miniature artichokes.  They can be dried to flavor foods all year. I gathered acorns from the Emory oaks in the foothills, cracking the shells open for a slightly resinous treat.  For the second year my husband Dave and I picked and dried mesquite pods for a year’s supply of the nutritious, fragrant flour to add to any baking. We also have lots of bottles of magenta nectar we squeezed from prickly pear fruit in the freezer.

Working the past seven years to put on both our farmers markets, I know who raises what in our county and try to visit all the participating farms and ranches.  One of the perks of the job is that I often get rewarded with a few chickens, or some nitrate-free bacon, a bunch of beets, a bag of apples or some new pickle or jam to try.

I like eating local food not only because I know the stories behind it but because I can trust it. I know that the food doesn’t contain antibiotics and hormones or the ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup (claimed by many to contribute to the rampant diabetes and obesity.) I know that it has no pesticide residues that also pollute ground water and kill wildlife.  I know that it was grown on ground that was naturally enriched.  I also know that it didn’t travel far to get to my plate.

I am happy to buy food at the farmers markets from local farmers and ranchers, beekeepers, picklers, bakers and canners because it helps family farms stay in business so that we retain them and the very hard working and dedicated experts who know how to produce food.

 As I am also recovering from a serious chronic illness, I feel that eating “clean” foods and grass-fed meats and pastured eggs proven to have a lot more beta carotene and omega 3’s and a lot less cholesterol than their factory-farmed counterparts, has contributed to my well being.  

It appears I’m not alone in seeking and eating local foods.  In 2005 a group of concerned culinary adventurers in San Francisco challenged people from the Bay area (and all over the world) to eat only foods grown or harvested within a 100 mile radius of their home for the month of August. They coined the word “locavore” for someone whose first choice is local food. Their website, www.locavore.com  states their reasons.  “We recognize that the choices we make about what foods we choose to eat are important politically, environmentally, economically, and healthfully.”

This was the spark that ignited people all across the country to create groups that vowed to eat locally raised foods and then wrote about their experiences.  There was some suffering involved depending upon how narrowly you defined local.  The purists resisted tropically-grown chocolate and coffee and found trying to eat only local all year was impossible or challenging especially in winter.

Gary Paul Nabhan, one of the founders of Native Seed/SEARCH and former director of NAU’s Center for Sustainable Living, now back in Tucson at the University of Arizona’s Southwest Center, is credited with starting the local food movement with his 2002 book, “Coming Home to Eat.”  It is about a year of trying to eat from his “food shed” or 250 miles of Tucson.  “It is the story of finding kindred food-loving souls within a 250-mile radius of my home in Arizona, and sharing with them the pleasures of gardening and gathering, pit roasting and fermenting, feasting and frolicking,” writes Nabhan in the preface.

Two books that spent time on the best sellers list this year helped to further inform and inspire locavores.  Novelist Barbara Kingsolver wrote a book called “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” about relocating her family from Tucson to rural Appalachia where they vowed to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves or learn to live without it.   

Kingsolver and her husband stopped in Tucson on their national book signing trip. I was privileged to attend this session that had a church filled to the rafters with a crowd that roared with laughter as she showed pictures and read from the book.

A more serious but also entertaining note was struck by investigative journalist Michael Pollan who ate and wrote about three meals, a local, an industrial and a foraged one, after visiting the farms, forests and feedlots where they were created.  His book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” is now a paperback best seller.  These books and the dialog spawned by them have been reported in every magazine and newspaper in the country.

The popularity of the local food movement comes at a time of depressing news about global warming. It has caught the nation’s attention as it’s fun and you get to eat what you promote.  Finding and feasting on local foods is about anticipation and celebration which makes people want to take part.

According to Local Harvest (www.localharvest.org) over three million different people used their site to find local farms.  Buying local is gaining critical mass with over 2500 new farms and farmers markets creating listings in their national directory this year.  

To crown the local food movement’s influence on the national psyche, the Oxford American Dictionary chose “locavore” as the 2007 new word of the year.

So I invite you this year, not to take my word for it, but to try incorporating some local food in your diet on a weekly basis to see if it does make a difference in your life.  This page will assist you in finding local food and help you get started growing your own.  It will include columns by two successful small organic growers, Cheri Melton and Keith Parker, as well as inform you of organic farm and garden field trips and workshops, local food celebrations and cooking demonstrations in southern Arizona.  Please send feedback on how you fare!