local lent: finding food

How hard is it to find local food in Atlanta?

In some ways, it's easier than I expected. Atlanta boasts one of the most car-centric downtowns and the worst suburban sprawl in the nation, but it also enjoys one rare advantage: a year-round farmer's market. In the summertime, Morningside Market is a bursting corner of music, flowers, vegetables, and fruit. In the winter, things are a lot smaller, calmer, and colder. But it's still there, and that's more than you can say for most farmer's markets.

Morningside is only open on Saturday mornings, so we reluctantly got up early. It was freezing cold--probably around 20 degrees--which effectively squelched our original plan to ride bikes. I think if I'd been going by myself, I might have been just dumb enough to still try it, but my husband reminded me that we didn't know how much we'd be carrying back. So we took the car, and since the market is less than two miles from our house, it didn't add too much to our food miles.

There were only about four farms there, but I was pleasantly surprised at how much diversity they had. Lots of greens, of course, and many of them had courteously put salad mixes of winter greens into bags, ready to sell. I bought two: one with kale, chard, and arugula, and the other with collards and cabbage.

But man cannot live on salad alone, and my next (rather more daunting) task was to find something we could use for our main dishes. There was one beef farmer represented, but meat's not included in an Orthodox Lenten diet, so I had to find vegetables that could work for a main course. I prefer to eat vegetarian anyway, so that wasn't a problem. The problem--which I realized as soon as I started looking at the options--is that I'm simply not used to cooking winter vegetables.

I've read that most people only eat a small variety of different foods; I think the average was around 20 or 30 basic types of food, if that much. It's strange, but in a way, the fact that we have so many choices actually means we eat less variety. Because our favorite dishes are available year-round, we just eat the same thing over and over. I don't think I've ever made a vegetarian meal, for example, that didn't use tomatoes. But there were no tomatoes at the farmer's market on Saturday.

What there was at the market was a lot of vegetables I'd never used before, and some I didn't even recognize. I ended up buying mostly vegetables I'd never cooked, and probably never even eaten, before: rutabegas, some obscure variety of turnip, bok choy, and tatsoi. And some carrots and yellow squash.

Once I had my vegetables, I could start to plan what I would cook. I decided I had two basic meal possibilities: the rutabegas and squash could go in a southern meal, while the turnip and greens could make an Asian meal (one of the sellers told me that the turnip went well in miso soup, and a customer said the bok choy and tatsoi would be good in a stir-fry). But when I went online to look up recipes, I realized I was going to have another problem.

I'm not an experienced cook; I try not to experiment too much with recipes. When I do make substitutions, I usually regret it. But the problem was that all recipes take for granted the availability of basic spices. And you generally can't get spices locally. There's a reason why spices have been considered a luxury through most of history: they really can't grow everywhere.

I did, however, have one more trick up my sleeve: Sevenanda. Sevenanda is a locally owned co-op grocery that frequently carries local food. Whether it would offer what I needed to pull together a couple of decent meals was a separate question, but I decided to at least try.

So on Monday I made the most unusual grocery list I have ever made. I looked up three or four different recipes involving squash and rutabegas, giving priority to the recipes requiring as few ingredients as possible. Then I made lists of what I still needed for each recipe, keeping my ideas flexible until I could see what was available. Armed with that, I hopped on my bike and rode to Sevenanda.

But I was disappointed. I did manage to find some locally-prepared vegetarian snacks (thank goodness, because by then I was starving). But there was no way I could find butter, sugar, salt, or pepper that was grown locally. And my own herb garden, with parsley, rosemary, and thyme, wasn't much help either.

By this time, I was getting desperate. I was starting to feel like this idea was a little rash. It was one thing to eat unseasoned food myself--but was it really fair to ask that of my husband?

I finally decided to compromise. Is it cheating if I use seasonings I bought at the locally owned co-op? At least the money is still going back into my community, even if the food didn't come from here. I'm going to attempt to improve my methods as the week goes on. But if you think I'm cheating, don't be too harsh with me; try this yourself first. It's harder than it looks.