Eat Local Challenge: May 2006

"I can tell how busy you are by the fact that your blog postings have slowed to a trickle," a friend told me recently.  I was talking to her at about ten o'clock at night after having been on a 9:30 p.m. work call.  Though sometimes I do an okay job with being very busy and holding everything together, this is not one of those times.  I have been head-down focused on work for several weeks now.  And it's going to continue for a while longer before I can come up for a breather.

But, I wanted to take a moment this morning to tell you about a few things, mainly to do with the Eat Local Challenge.  Last year, a group of over sixty bloggers joined the San Francisco-based Locavores to declare August "eat local" month.  We all set ground rules that we could live with and ate food from our local foodshed for the whole month.  The ground rules differed by blogger and were as varied and diverse as we are. 

This year, the Locavores have changed the Eat Local month to May so that we can all try eating local during a different season ... that's a little over a month from now!  May is one of my favorite times of the year.  Here in San Francisco, May will most likely mean strawberries, peas, cherries, artichokes, cucumbers, summer squash, potatoes, salmon and halibut.  I know that some of you in other parts of the country will barely be out of frost time, and it will be up to you to decide whether you want to participate in May and to what extent it will be possible.

So now for some news.  First, I have been invited to be a part of the organizing committee for the Locavores.  Along with Jessica Prentice, Sage Van Wing, and Dede Sampson, I will be helping to organize the Locavore effort for eating locally in May.  This means that there will be some organized collaboration between the blogger eat local effort and the Locavores, which I find to be exciting.

Secondly, I am launching a new blog that will focus on all things having to do with the Eat Local Challenge.  It will be a place with multiple authors, where anyone participating in or organizing an Eat Local Challenge during any time of the year can post about how they are doing.  I am hoping that it will be a portal for bloggers who want to point to Eat Local discussions on their blogs, as well as a place for some non-bloggers to write about their Eat Local experience.   If you are interested in being an author on this blog, would you email me? 

Comments

[Kathy]

This is so exciting! I can't wait to see what the new Eat Local Challenge site will do as it grows and more people get involved.

[Pim]

This is great Jen. It should be such fun, I am definitely going to do it. I might even give myself a bit more restrictions this year too.

best of luck,
Pim