Great Local Food for Tight Budgets

Who doesn’t want to be part of the rapidly growing local-food movement? Who wouldn’t want to eat in one of the restaurants popping up like local mushrooms and serving the same, atop a sizzling sample of locally sourced filet mignon? Who wouldn’t want to buy a lovely, fresh chicken grown and harvested by the farmer down the road?

Until quite recently, I confess, the answer to each of those questions would be: me.

Ironically, or perhaps hypocritically, the same reason I pinch pennies at the grocery store and used to eschew local food is the reason why I live here: I love the region. I’m part of the local community and I’m choosing to stay here, downsizing my spending to make more room for the dayto- day things that meet my definition of a good life.

It’s a conundrum, because the choice to live in Northern Michigan brings hard choices about what I can afford. I asked myself early on, “Where can I cut back?” My answer: “On food.” It’s the one big variable in my budget.

So, in what I thought was an act of great self-sacrifice, I decided to cut my food budget pretty literally to the chicken bone. This wasn’t easy. Food gives me joy. I love pretty much everything about it. I’m a passionate cook. I love the nuances of fine dining. And in my previous life, on a payroll with a healthy, regular income, I spared no expense in this department.

Determined to live more simply (read frugally), I had no appetite for the local food movement. Just another bandwagon, I told myself. An economically elitist idea that’s become a great marketing tool for highdollar groceries. How do I even know that milk is local?

At first, my only concern was just how little I could spend. But as my family and friends might have predicted in whispers behind my back, it wasn’t possible to stay the course. Not because I missed my culinary extravagences. But because I had to ask myself the question: If I really want a simpler, healthier life, connected to the land, the water and the people of Northern Michigan, how can I not be mindful of where I get my food? And so, abandoning my false virtue, “I can’t afford” to buy the local chicken became “I can’t afford not to.”

The problem remains, though, how to shop locally on a strict budget? The question faces thousands of people who live in Northern Michigan—the service workers, smallbusiness owners, teachers, artists and tradespeople who make up the bulk of the workforce that drives this booming agritourism region and who struggle to make ends meet. I’m one of them.

Local food advocates are well aware of that challenge. Meghan McDermott is food and farming program director at Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities, a local nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the local farm community.

“There’s certainly a stereotype of a certain amount of elitism, and that’s earned to some extent,” she says. “But it doesn’t need to be that way. There are ways that local food can be affordable. I think, to some extent, at the end of the day it’s consumer awareness.”

Consumer awareness is what she and other local-food advocates spend a lot of time trying to create. The Groundwork Center has a big focus on the schools. Since 2004, the center has been working to connect schools and students to local farms and food. They reach more than 2,000 students with regular classroom activities that teach about healthy food grown locally. That’s just one example. The Traverse City Community Garden donates hundreds of pounds of locally produced vegetables to area soup kitchens. The federally funded Double Up Food Bucks program doubles the local-food purchasing power for families receiving food assistance through SNAP.

There’s no question the efforts of localfood advocates are having an impact. Although statistics are still hard to come by—because the definition of “local” is still somewhat arbitrary—the USDA reports the amount of local food consumed in the American diet has tripled in the last 20 years. Tricia Phelps, CEO of Taste the Local Difference, says interest in the localfood movement in Northern Michigan is fueling an agri-tourism movement that has become a crucial part of the local economy.

“It’s astounding to see the momentum and the way this has taken off in the last decade.

It’s more than just a national trend being applied here, it’s a shift in our identity in lifting up local farmers.”

She points to four reasons people want local food: the local economic benefits, the health component, the social impact and concern for the environment.

Armed with my own consumer awareness about these benefits, I made a personal vow to shop more locally. So this is what I do: I start with a budget. The USDA estimates a modest budget for a family of two to be roughly $90 a week. That’s my baseline. I try to stick to it. And I try to include some local element to each day’s menu. Here’s a sample week:

Sunday: I bought the local chicken. At $4.99 a pound, it was roughly five times as expensive as I could find an out-of-town fryer on sale. But I bought it. And I planned around it. I put the chicken in the oven for Sunday dinner, inspired by a memorable lunch I attended years ago where I had the pleasure of meeting Jacques Pepin and Julia Child. They were doing a public television program together that highlighted their friendly differences in the kitchen, but they shared their passion for the simple roast chicken. Accompanied by a side of Michigan red potatoes, bathed in butter, and a simple salad dressed in pan juices, that chicken was elegantly delicious. And there was more for later meals.

Monday: Why cook when you have leftovers? One of the wonderful things about a roast chicken is how many ways it can live on through the week. On Monday, the bird became a piquant chicken-celery salad. I fired up the panini maker I thought I would never use when my mother gave it to me one Christmas, slathered that chicken salad on sourdough with robust slices of tomato and called it dinner.

Tuesday: We gave the chicken a rest and opted for pizza. Homemade pizza topped with local oyster mushrooms and rainbow chard made it seem like I was back in Chicago’s famous pizza diaspora, not budgeting my way through the week’s menu. I made the sauce from the last of my frozen garden tomatoes from last summer. We used one of the two crusts I made and saved the other.

Wednesday: I put on a pot of black beans and returned to the chicken. The remaining ten ounces of meat became one of our favorite meals—chicken enchiladas verde, served with refried black beans (a long-standing staple in my home) and Mexican rice.

Thursday: Black bean soup and a salad. I made enough beans the day before to set aside the base for this soup, garnished with shredded cabbage, chopped jalapenos and sour cream. Tip: Homemade tortilla chips are easy and cheap and much tastier than the pricey packaged chips at the market.

Friday: Burger night. That pound of local beef, on sale for $5.99, cost more than double what I would have paid for a package of ground round from whoknows- where. And to be truthful, I didn’t think the grass-fed burger was twice as tasty as its grain-fed cousin. But it was local and that means more than just flavor. I remember where I was during the PBB crisis of the ’70s—at the local Burger Chef, working and eating enough of that tainted meat to give me pause to this day about the long-term health effects. Saturday: Mushroom risotto, with homemade garlic bread sticks made from the leftover pizza dough.

The chicken stretched through three dinners. By carefully considering how to build meals around the remainder of my purchases, I stayed within budget that week and managed to enjoy some of my favorite meals. I should say, breakfasts and lunches are catch-as-catch-can in my home. But I do have some tricks. Homemade granola is great with plain yogurt, a handful of blueberries, an ounce of diced cheddar cheese and a drizzling of local maple syrup. Eggs, which I buy from the farmer down the street when I can, are $3 a dozen. Sometimes I find them for $2.

Some other basic tips:

• Don’t give up the foods you love. Just buy them more strategically. A quart of local maple syrup is expensive. But a few tablespoons are not. The important strategy is not to buy too much. Eat what you buy and don’t waste food.

• Snacks: Carrots, celery and popcorn are all cheaper than chips and Cheetos. Healthier too.

• Cheese: Grate your own. Don’t buy it pre-shredded. It’s more expensive and you’re paying for the processing, which includes the additives that keep it fresh but also dry. I keep parmesan and cheddar in the fridge most of the time.

• Buy in bulk: I don’t do this most of the time, but it’s part of my master plan this year. Local meat, in bulk, is actually more economical than buying random cuts of meat from any source at the market. It requires a freezer and, in our case, someone to split the quarter cow with.

• Consider a community-supported agriculture subscription: CSAs are a great way to buy directly from local farmers and they’re popping up everywhere. Pricing structures vary, but most ask for a payment up front in exchange for regular deliveries during the season. Not restricted to vegetable farms anymore, share or club purchasing can be found for bread, meat, eggs and more.

• Garden: I live in the woods, a great place for communing with the birds. A bad place for growing tomatoes. Horrible really. But I love to garden. So when I got the chance to sign up for a plot at the Traverse City Community Garden, I jumped at it. If you have the time and the space, gardening is a great way to afford to eat locally. Even if you can only garden from large pots outside your door, certain things, like herbs and tomatoes, can really help the budget and the kitchen.

Maybe most important: Don’t be afraid to fail. My best intentions sometimes fail miserably. I may fall prey to an extravagant night out or a 99-cent-a-pound ham from Iowa on sale just after Easter and blow my goals, my budget or both in any given week. But I am trying, in ways large and small, to be more mindful and more connected to the local food community. I’d call my efforts a work in progress. Like the rest of my simpler life.