The way I see it right now, it is better to do as much something as possible than to throw in the towel because you can't stay away from oranges, for example. It is kind of like dieting - so OK, you had ice cream today, but you don't give up on your diet entirely! You dust yourself off and pick up again tomorrow where you left off.

The difference between a 100-mile diet and a weight-loss diet is that unless you sustain your weight loss choices daily and for many weeks, the pounds won't come off. In contrast, each 100-mile choice you make, such as reaching for local potatoes at Whole Foods, for exammple, instead of the cheaper Idaho potatoes, has several repercussions: you vote for the item that has emitted less carbon, you support the local economy, you influence the buying patterns of Whole Foods, and you may even get a fresher product with more nutrition.

We don't know, at this time, what level of carbon emission would save the Earth. It is probably less than we think. We do all have to do more than we are doing. And we have to talk to each other about it, because there is nothing worse than that sense of futility that comes from depriving yourself for nothing.

So which exceptions should you choose?

I have a sense that (just as for health or weight loss) making stepwise changes in the right direction that you can sustain "forever" is the right way to go. Sure you could eat 100% local for a week. You'd get hungry, you'd think "this is for the birds!", you'd eat too much beef, and if you picked your month right, you wouldn't really miss anything crucial.

But if you make changes this month, such as eating only market vegetables, then keep it up next month because it was fun and delicious, and the month after that because you know the farmers depend on you, etc... then eventually the food system will change. And if then next month, you find a source of local oats, barley, millet and buckwheat, and cut back on rice by 80%, again you have changed Big Agriculture, and you have impacted the forces that would have us all eat genetically modified corn and soy in three hundred different forms.

This is what I am doing: I am using as exceptions the foods that allow me to drastically cut down on processed foods, out-of-season foods, and non-local foods. For example, peanut butter is how my picky 6 year old deals with the fact that he can't/won't fill up on asparagus, or quiche, or onion tart... The California-fruit-of-the-month (strawberries in May, cherries in June) is how we deal with the fact that I have cut back on boxed breakfast cereals drastically (75% or so). Then there are a host of non-local products I still buy because I don't have my act together (cooking oil, bread, sliced turkey, California leeks, yogurt, popsicles...). These are things I could learn to do without, get better at baking myself, spend more time cooking and slicing, grow myself, and make myself - it makes me dizzy just to think about it! Nevertheless, it is happening little by little.

But most importantly is what I do - each summer week, I give $50 to Cure Farm in vegetable and fruit shares, plus eggs, and another $50 to market vendors on Saturdays. That's easily the majority of our food dollars spent in Boulder County. This is so powerful that if everyone in Boulder made the same decision, we would simply run out of food. Hah! If that doesn't preserve farmland and help the local economy, I don't know what would!

Another trick is to take some vacation one day per week - if you work outside the home - or otherwise planning to spend a good part of one day each week preserving food for the winter. The main advantage of this, other than preserving the tastes and memories of summer, and keeping your food local, is that you do "cook ahead", in a sense, canning or freezing foods in a way that will simplify your life in winter - pesto, tomato sauce, and in some cases whole dinners.

One disadvantage of spending time in the kitchen in August and September is that it gets really hot in there... I have heard of folks canning using an outdoor setup, and also people using a solar food dehydrator. I'm afraid this is a topic where I am getting ahead of myself, because I really haven't tried it. I still find it daunting, trying to get dinner on the table and actually trying to fit in food preservation simultaneously. However, I can see that it would get easier with practice - for example, I could can a small batch aa I am sauteing vegetables for dinner - it's just that canning is so new it requires my full attention at thie time. Meanwhile, the strawberry-rhubarb jam I did make sits in the refrigerator where it withstands daily assaults from the kids.

The Bon Appetit website does give some guidelines as to what to avoid in terms of carbon impact:
- food flown in
- food grown in a (local or not) heated greenhouse
- processed food
- packaged food

The answer may be to have a list of possible strategies:
- is there an acceptable substitute?
- does it exist in dried form?
- is there something I can do to atone for this moment? (just kididng!!)

And then:
- How do I plan for this in the future?

According to the authors of "Putting Food By", you can safely preserve peaches, for example, without sugar in the syrup. You can use plain water, or juice, in whatever ratio you like. The fruit may taste better in light syrup, but the sweetener is not needed for preserving. There are still detailed steps to follow, including for keeping the fruit from turning unappetizing colors, but the process seems do-able, and apparently, many of the fruits keep better that way than frozen.

If you enjoy beans, they can be a staple in your diet. They can be inexpensive, high-quality food, enhancing salads, soups, used as a dip or spread, or mixed with vegetables as chili. I unfortunately do not have that much experience with beans, but it appears they are best cooked a very long time. Following the average recipe for an hour or two of cooking time will often produce a dish that causes gas. Some sites claim that older beans will cause more gas. Here is a website that promises success with beans while minimizing gas - adding certain herbs also supposedly helps. Dried epazote (mentioned in the article) is available in Boulder from Jay Hill Farm. Dried beans are most plentiful at the Abbondanza Farmer's Market stand.

Local nuts and seeds can be hard to find. It is easy enough to grow your own sunflowers, though not all of course are suitable for seed production, and you will have to fight the birds for it. Coastalfields farm does sell sunflower seeds. Pumpkin seeds are also delicious and nutritious, and a pain in the neck to prepare... but they could be used as a snack for kids, for example. Just the fact that it is so hard to get them out will slow you down from eating too many! Almonds do grow in Colorado, and walnuts too, though I have not found a local producer.

Tomatoes can well in a hot water bath because they are acidic. It is rather easy to find a recipe on the web. Barbara Kingsolver has one on the animalvegetablemiracle.com website. You can also can tomato chutney. A good trick would be to find something to do with all the green tomatoes you rescue from the first September frost (out here in Colorado). There is a green tomato chutney, and I'm sure other recipes as well. I've also been interested in making my own ketchup. My first attempt was not very successful with the kids, who are, after all, the major ketchup consumers. I am trying to make it thick, not too exotic, and to spare the salt (!!), oh, and also, I am trying to hide other vegies in it...

Tomatoes also dry well, though you would ideally pick the right kind, such as "Principe Borghese".

You can freeze tomato juice and tomato sauce, but there is no point in freezing whole tomatoes, unless you mean to can them, or make sauce with them.

You will have a hard time finding sauce made locally from local tomatoes. Perhaps in California, but for example, one Denver company I called said they got their tomatoes from California, and their glass jars from China.

But where to find local oats or barley? One place to start is localharvest.org, and see what farms local to you list as their crops. In the Denver area, Coastalfields farm appears to be the only one to offer barley, buckwheat and quinoa. Most of the quinoa grown in the continental US is apparently grown in Colorado's San Luis valley, which is "local" to very few people...

Another method may be to ask at the farmer's market who has heard of another farm growing amaranth, or buckwheat. At the Boulder Farmer's Market, one woman was selling corn for grinding into cornmeal. Another was selling corn for posole, yet another was selling corn for popping, and of course, later in the summer, we'll have sweet corn.

Lynnet at LoveLandLocal has experimented at length with millet, and reports several successful recipes here. Just scroll down until you find her entry on millet.

Oatmeal, by the way, is simply oats rolled using a heavy rolling pin, or so I am told. There is a type of oat called "hulless", which you can roll without hulling, which apparently is otherwise a laborious process.

Whole wheat berries can be cooked like rice or barley, or sprouted and added to salads or bread. Some nutritional authors (see Fallon's "Nourishing Traditions" recommend avoiding regular wheat, and focusing instead on sprouted wheat. Wheat sprouts are surprisingly sweet and fun to add to salads.

One can freeze or can (pressure can) green beans, eat shell beans or dry them. Some variety of beans are just as good at any stage, while others are best green, or best dried and preserved for the winter. The fancy young tender beans are best preserved frozen.

Other than books, a good source of advice on food preservation is the agricultural extension office for your state. For example, there are tricks concerning altitude, because the temperature of boiling water is slightly lower at higher altitudes. There are formulas to calculate safe processing times at different altitudes.

I include in this category anything that is made mostly with flour. There are extensive lists of grains grown in each state, but it is just about impossible to find local sources of flour for each. For example, these days I am using barley flour, rye flour, buckwheat flour, oat flour, amaranth flour, etc... I think variety is good for us. However, I am far from having found a local source for each. Farmers who grow these crops sell them in the "commodities market", and they disappear along with small amounts of grains from other parts, travel to wherever, and are ground and repackaged and re-shipped without any clue as to where they came from.

One thing about the health aspect of this. One issue with grains and flour that the carbohydrate phobia got right, is that they may, especially in some people, over-stimulate insulin production by the pancreas. This causes several problems:

First of all, insulin is a storage hormone, so if what you are eating is high in calories (say it has quite a bit of fat, such as a cookie or cake, or muffin would), then these calories may be stored more efficiently than if you ate the fat with protein only. I think that is what the Atkins diet is based on, and it does work well for a subset of people. One study suggests that people who tend to have a spare tire around their waist, or a high triglyceride blood level, would respond especially well to the Atkins diet.

Second, it appears that once whole grains are pulverized into flour, the digestion of the starch (which turns it to glucose) happens too efficiently, thus sending blood glucose levels soaring and causing a strong insulin response (insulin's job being to store the glucose out of the blood, and thus restore blood levels to normal). The problem with getting the pancreas stimulated to produce large amounts of insulin several times every day, is that the pancreas can eventually tire itself out, which is one contributing cause to diabetes. Foods can be ranked by their ability to cause this insulin spike - one attempt to do this is the glycemic index. For example, glucose, or fructose have some of the highest glycemic indexes, but white flour would be next, maybe whole wheat flour next after that (and note that you can grind flour to varying degrees), bulghur may be next after whole wheat, and wheat kernels may have the lowest glycemic index, for that particular food.

So I'm explaining all this to say that given widespread availability of wheat flour ground by other people, it is tempting to eat bread, pasta, waffles, English muffins, cookies, quickbreads, etc, etc... every day, but if you have to grind the flour and bake the item yourself, it becomes a bit of a treat, and that is just as well, because it may not be that good for you.

Local-wise, one should be able to find folks who grow wheat locally, as there are hundred of varieties of wheat, each adapted to a different region. You can also approach it in a bullseye kind of way, identifying local bread bakers or pasta brands made with flour from "not too far", and eventually narrowing it down to a grower of local wheat. Wheat berries apparently store forever (protected from bugs...), and can be ground easily, either in a manual mill, or in a coffee grinder (well, I guess you would need a dedicated coffee grinder).

Here in Boulder, we have Butte Mill flour, grown and ground in Boulder County. I did not succeed in baking bread with it, though I am having trouble with all flour at this time (...), but I made nice pizza dough (half and half with unbleached bread flour), and used the wheat bran I obtained through sifting the flour in a granola recipe.

Corn can also be canned with a pressure canner, or dried. There are several ways to preserve it, either as creamed corn mixture, or raw kernels, etc... The most important thing is not to expect to preserve it with a hot water bath as it is not at all acidic and would spoil.