Thanks, everyone, for hanging with me through this week. It was interesting to write down what I ate.
I wanted to clear up one thing first: This was just an attempt to write down what I eat on a regular basis - to see how close I come during normal, everyday life to eating locally and sustainably.
Overall, I would say that in my everyday life, the good guys win at the end of the day. Every day is sprinkled with some good things and a couple bad things. But each day that I wrote, I would say that the good guys won out over the bad guys.
The restaurant eating is a frustrating thing. Even in a town like San Francisco, your best bet for eating locally and sustainably is to cook for yourself. Of course there are many exceptions, but they are not every day exceptions. I need to get better at asking people exactly what ingredients are in food. For instance, on day seven: It would have been completely legitimate for me to ask the falafel guy where he gets his ingredients, but I didn't.
Just on a diet note: I realized this week that I need to eat more green veggies! I was actually fairly surprised by that. I would say that this week was a little more protein heavy than I usually eat, but there really didn't seem to be many veggies in there.
The Chronicle today had a lengthy article about eating locally and a group of women who are challenging themselves to eat within a 100-mile radius* for the month of August. Good timing! Start thinking about whether you would be willing to try some part of this challenge for the month. You would be able to set your own paramenters and the challenge can be whatever you choose: eating locally one day a week, one meal a day, etc. I am going to be posting a challenge to any of you who wish to participate -- for those of you who have a blog, I will be posting a meme in the next few days discussing it.
* The 100-mile radius, I suspect, comes from Gary Paul Nabhan's excellent book Coming Home to Eat. Thanks to everyone who posted about this book. I read it a year or two ago, and it was one of those life-altering books for me. The amazing thing that Nabhan did was to try and commit to eating foods native to his area. That would be many times more difficult than even trying to eat local. So let's just stick to local for the moment - that will be an amazing start.
Read the food tracking series:
