SARE Grants Boost Locavore Food Movement

Reader Contribution by Gwen Roland
Published on December 18, 2008
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As part of the Growing Minds farm-to-school program near Asheville, N.C., 3rd grade students from Brush Creek Elementary help prune celariac at R-Farm in Madison County.

Trendy’s not usually my thing. For more than 30 years, I’ve worn the same outfit of thrift store overalls colored with Rit Dye. My hairstyle has been pretty much the same since eighth grade; when it gets so long it hangs in the toilet, I whack off a few inches. So to find myself part of the hottest new food trend is unsettling. I’m a locavore, the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2007 word of the year. Furthermore, since I was chomping local long before it was cool, you might say I’m a trendsetter. This is heady stuff for a person who has marched out of step and in the wrong direction most of her life.

For example, there was a year in the ’80s when we lived on a tiny hammock in the Everglades. Hunters stopped by our primitive camp site where we weighed carcasses, pulled jawbones from deer and measured antlers for wildlife biologists. The nearest supermarkets were a world away on the outskirts of Miami, but that doesn’t mean we went hungry. We feasted on local tomatoes, green beans, avocados, citrus fruit, game and fish.

The fish were hand-sized sun perch caught by our son Brint. Several times a week we’d roast a batch of them in a long-handled basket over the campfire. No plates required, we just nibbled them off the tiny skeletons. One night we were late starting supper and had to roast them after dark. Not only did they get too brown — charcoal comes to mind — but by the time we finished eating we were smeared with essence of fish from slapping at mosquitoes with our greasy hands. It seemed like a good night for a bath.

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