Location, location, location!

In addition to being almost giddy about filling the freezer with our recent pork procurement....

Oh, pork sausage, how I adore thee, patiently awaiting your destiny.
 Biscuits & Gravy or Sausage Patties with Fried Eggs - I cannot decide.

.....I'm also happy to know that we're practicing good "Eating Ethics".  Not only do we know that this hog was raised in a humane manner, but it keeps money in our local economy; the local farmer and local butcher.  This hog has traveled a total of only twenty-six miles from the farm to the butcher to our house.

Our beef is also acquired and butchered locally; another round trip drive of less than 35 miles.

Getting milk is a simple jaunt across the yard to the barn.  As is gathering eggs; from hens that we hatched out from our own flock.

Cornish Cross meat chickens are raised on our homestead.  Although technically the chicks do have a moderate drive from Southern Missouri to the local feed store, then on to our house.  But it's still "only" a one-hundred and sixteen mile trip.

The occasional deer, squirrel, rabbit and goat also come from our property.  Not a single drop of diesel fuel was used to transport them to our freezer.

Hopefully this spring, summer and fall, the majority of our vegetables will be a short hop, skip and jump to our raised beds.  Then there are those "unplanned" and "freebie" wild foods like plums, grapes, blackberries and persimmons.  Wild greens like henbit, lambs quarters, amaranth, onions, garlic, poke and dandelions.  Clover and lemon balm for herbal teas.  Black walnuts (icky) and Hickory nuts (yummy).   And I'm sure a plethora (hehe) of other goodies I have yet to find, identify or taste.  All this in the uncultivated areas around our homestead or just a short walk down the road.

There is also a seasonal Farmer's Markets on the weekends, one of them just four miles from our house.  I'd also like to try and do some more bartering with local folk.  Last year I traded our goat milk for fresh fish, pork and venison.

In the "bigger" town, there's a health food store that sells local produce.  Local as in our County or neighboring Counties.  Unfortunately, even some of the big box stores have been using the word "Local" on some of their produce although it means something quite different to them than it does us.  Yes, those apples are located closer than say, Chile, but still two states away.  Not so much local if you asked me.

Now that I've babbled on about purchasing stuff locally, let me be the first to tell you that I still buy apples at the store in the winter and spring.  I buy bananas that were once packed in huge metal cargo containers and floated across the ocean, traveled by rail or semi truck, then delivered to my local grocery store.  Then I will drive the eleven miles (one way) to purchase those bananas, then drive the eleven miles back home.  Just so Rhiannon and I can indulge in a peanut butter and banana sandwich.  

Same could be said for the bulk wheat we purchase.  Even though I grind it into flour in my own grain mill and bake the bread in my own oven therefore saving the actual wheat berries a trip to / from mills and bakeries, the actual wheat has still traveled two thousand miles from a wheat field in Montana to a distribution warehouse in Southern Michigan, then down to us in Arkansas.

Need I mention how far that Earl Gray Tea I drink so often has to travel???

So even though we don't grow our own grains, mine our own salt or have a heated greenhouse large enough to grow our own banana trees, we do what is feisable in order to reduce our dependence on foods that we are able to produce or buy locally.  It just takes a little more planning.