Dispatches from Dufferin Street

Food

 Steps to take today

• eat food from within Ontario

• don’t drive

• stop making trash

• don’t buy anything new

11:55 am, 10°C outside, 19.5°C inside

Besides my eensy-weensy hangover, which may be caused by exhaustion more than alcohol, I enter Day Four feeling wonderful. The step-by-step introduction of challenges is really working for me, just tackling one thing each day, yet carrying it over to the next day when we add something new.

I feel much more thoughtful this week about every single thing I consume, and that consideration is certainly something that I will take forward after this week. I now look at every single thing I am considering buying, and think: Do I need this? Could I make it myself or get it secondhand? Could I find it somewhere without any packaging? If I must buy something in packaging, can I re-purpose the package? Where did it come from?

A few days ago, I would have said I thought about all those things a fair bit, and I did, in a broad kind of way. However, once I started applying those questions to everything – no exceptions, no, “well, it’s TOOTHPASTE, I need it!” – it all changed. By considering those basic questions as many as hundreds of times each day, I know that every the product I consume is one that I’ve really, *really* thought about. Does that mean every thing I ever buy will be fairly traded, local, healthy, free of packaging, and secondhand? Nope. Does it mean that I’ll do everything in my power to make as many purchases as possible that are lower-impact? Absolutely.

Hearing how excited Max was when I told him the house only created three pieces of non-recyclable/compostable garbage yesterday, and seeing how happy Leo was that we brought our own bag for a cinnamon bun today so we didn’t have to waste one… well, that’s some pretty awesome icing on the proverbial cake. The concepts are simple, really; the kids have zero difficulty understanding why we’re asking the questions we are, and honestly, if I’ve encouraged them to think a little bit about what they eat, wear, play with and how we get around, then that’s a great accomplishment.

End of day report

6:27am, 10°C outside, 21°C inside (yes!!)

Our local supper was 75% successful – Leo, Matt and I loved our roasted vegetable soup with toast fingers, Max was a fan of the toast, but not the soup. We had decided on shopping for food grown in Ontario for the rest of the week, and if I’d given this a little more thought in advance, we could have had a more tantalizing, complex meal, for sure. Tomorrow is market day, as well as as a school day for both kids, so I hope that I can pop down there to pick up some supplies for our meals for the next few days. I think I’ll spend this evening browsing cookbooks for inspiration. I am definitely in a rut of meals – I have my standards that we all love, but none of them are focused on local ingredients, and obviously, the whole local thing gets a little more challenging the further we get into autumn. I hope that tomorrow, we can pull off something we all love from local ingredients.

Oh. Except we’re not supposed to use electricity tomorrow. Yeah. Huh. I guess we could BBQ, except I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t actually know how the BBQ works and Matt won’t be home until after supper. OK, this is going to be harder than I thought, and the thought of eating a cold meal in a cold, dark house is not really doing it for me right now.

Well, crap. Googling raw food has thus far not inspired a lot of excitement. I think this challenge would work best for me if started on a summer weekend. All the recipes I have found involve a bunch of shopping for things we don’t have on hand, and a reasonable amount of prep work. I’m game for giving it a shot, but I don’t think I have the time or emotional fortitude to spend the three hours I have to myself tomorrow biking around town to pick up ingredients, then morphing them into something healthful and beautiful that my children won’t eat. I found a great-looking recipe for a burrito kind of thing, but almost none of the ingredients would be available in season here right now. Maybe we’ll stick with local and just try to minimize the amount of stove cooking we do, I don’t know… Or… cheese and crackers for supper? I do have some kielbassa in my fridge, as well as some summer sausage from the Mennonites in St. Jacob’s, Ontario. We could have a cold platter of finger foods from the fridge and pantry… maybe that’s the answer for tomorrow. Then we only have Friday to get through before the weekend where other people will feed us.

Speaking of which, there’s some cheatin’ on my mind. Matt’s parents are about to embark on a southern trip for the fall/winter, so weeks ago we made plans to go visit them in Brockville on Saturday, and my mom invited us to her place outside of Gananoque for a Hallowe’en candy-making party on Sunday. None of these things are really changeable, and forking over cash for four bus tickets is just not going to happen. So, we’re going to drive. Although we are adjusting our plans to minimize driving: we normally would come home from Brockville on Saturday night, and then head out to Gan on Sunday afternoon, allowing for a quiet morning at home. But our plan now is to sleep over in Brockville and go directly to Gananoque on Sunday morning, cutting the driving time by about an hour. That’s something, right?

Meals, drinks, snacks

Coffee (fair trade, organic, ordered in bulk, 10 pounds at a time. Not locally grown, and shipped from Uxbridge)

Milk (organic, from Guelph, Ontario, in reusable bags)

Soy milk (organic, “prepared” in Quebec)

Water (filtered at the tap)

Breakfast: bagels (don’t know where they’re made – bought in bulk at No Frills) with butter (Ontario) and honey (Ontario); homemade granola (non-local ingredients) with soy milk

Snacks: cookies (homemade, non-local ingredients), apples (Ontario), frozen berries/mangoes (definitely not local)

Lunch: Leftover mac and cheese from last night (local milk, cheese and butter, not sure on the flour or pasta)

Supper: vegetable soup (stock made from vegetable peels and ends from the freezer, then added local leeks, carrots, potatoes), local bread, butter and parmesan cheese (probably not local)

(I must add to this that while there is a bunch of stuff here that doesn’t fit our local requirement, I do have a house full of food that was already here, which I’m certainly not going to turf in order to go buy more local supplies. So, even the things here that aren’t super-local could be more so in future.) 

Garbage

• 1 piece of saran wrap

• 1 Qtip

• 1 gum package

• 1 piece of gum

• 1 soy milk container

• vegetable scraps from making stock

• 2 coffee filters and grounds

• 1 granola bar wrapper from a snack Max was given at school (he ‘fessed up to this as soon as he got home!)

Purchases

• $1.70, cinnamon bun

• $10.90, local produce at health-food store

Tomorrow

Energy