Romanticism and reality: Reasons to eat local

"I realize there's something romantic about the desire to know exactly where your food is from," wrote Time magazine's John Cloud.

But there's more than romanticism involved in a desire to eat locally grown food: a desire to impact the local economy, to eat better tasting and healthier produce and to make an impact on our environment.

Why eat local? For me, it started for two reasons: First, food tastes better the earlier it's eaten, and when it's shipped across the country only to sit in a grocery store, produce tends to lose its flavor and health benefits.

Second, it was about helping out the little guy and the local economy. Why not support the farmer around the corner?

But there are many other reasons to consider eating local. You can often get a better variety of produce by trying local than at the grocery. At one local market alone, I can easily find a dozen types of apples, compared to "green" or "red" at the local supermarket.

Reducing our dependence on oil is another reason to consider buying locally. The journal Food Policy even reports that locally food is "greener" than organic due to the impact of shipping for long distances. Reports the BBC:

... if all foods were sourced from within 20km of where they were consumed, environmental and congestion costs would fall from more than £2.3bn to under £230m - an "environmental saving" of £2.1bn annually.

Going local is something to consider, so why not start today? It's Going Local Week in Indiana: a weeklong "challenge" to eat at least one Indiana locally grown or produced food at each meal this week. How can you get started in an attempt to eat local?

• Shop at local farmers markets, farm stands, and farm markets.
• Visit an orchard or you-pick stand and harvest your own produce.
• Ask your local grocery store or market if they sell locally grown food.
• Support restaurants that use locally grown produce.
• Participate in a CSA.

Links to get you started:

• Find a list of Indiana farmers markets, farm stands, and you-pick produce.
• Find "going local" activities in your city.
• Find local eating tips.

Raspberry season

Raspberry time. It's one of the things we children clung to when we visited our grandparents in central Wisconsin. August is a horribly humid time to visit, but raspberries were one perk to our late-season travel.

My Grandma Johnson's garden plot seem to stretch forever, and tucked close to the neighbor's trees were a long row of raspberry plants. When we played outside, we'd occasionally check the plants, disappointed if the berries were still white and unripe. Each August, we'd wonder that maybe we'd be able to help her pick the berries this time.

On our weeklong summer visits, if we were lucky, Grandma would trot out small bowls of the bright red berries for dessert, apologizing if she'd forgotten and put sugar on the berries for my mother, who's diabetic.

And, sometimes, we were treated to her legendary Raspberry Dessert. It's such a treasured recipe that when we compiled a family cookbook a few Christmases ago, several of my cousins requested that someone hunt that recipe down.

Each summer, I wait patiently for raspberry season, hoping to score some at the local farmers market (not that they'd last longer than a day). And once again, I've missed it. While wondering this weekend when I might actually see raspberries at a local market, I looked online and learned I'd already missed peak season.

For those of you still fortunate to have raspberries in season, I share with you a family favorite, my Grandma Johnson's Raspberry Dessert. Enjoy!

Raspberry Dessert

Crust:
1/2 cup margarine
3 tablespoons sugar
1 1/4 cups flour

Mix until crumbly. Pat into 9 x 12-inch pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes or until light brown.

While baking, make topping:
1 1/2 cups water
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch

Cook until clear in saucepan. After it is clear, remove from heat and add 1 small box raspberry Jello. Cool.

On crust, spread 1 quart fresh or frozen berries. Pour Jello mixture over berries. Refrigerate until set and top with whipped topping.

A little altered art

Green gifts for 7 year olds are not exactly an easy thing to find. Somehow High School Musical and Hannah Montana don't exactly mesh with an environmentally friendly lifestyle.

I didn't set out specifically to give green this year for my niece's birthday, but economics played a role in my creation of altered art. Actually, a small scrapbook.

"Altered books" was a trend that seemed to peak in the scapbooking world a few years ago. Essentially, you'd take a book and repurpose it (with craft supplies of your choice) to make various art projects. As an avid reader, the whole concept made me cringe: Destroying the printed word?

But then, if the book isn't being appreciated for the literary impact on your life, maybe it's time to give it a new home or a new life.

In this case, it wasn't literature but a small photo album that I'd received when my daughter was born. Branded with the information for a formula company, it was a small album that housed a few dozen 4x6 photos.

For three years, it's collected dust while I waited for someone else to dump it on. For about that long, I have had random stickers, including puffy ones that I'd somehow acquired, that have met a similar fate. The two made a great pairing, as the album received a fun facelift.

Throw in a few dozen photos of my kids and my niece, and you have a one-of-a-kind gift for the girl who dearly misses her little cousins many miles away.

Is it simple? Sure. Is it high art? Hardly. But sometimes you have to put a little heart in your art.

Happy birthday, Sam. We miss you.

Finding a new life for tired music

Each morning, en route to work, I pop in a compact disc into my car. And each morning, I sigh and mutter, Can't listen to that in front of "them," and hit fast-forward through all my "oldies" but goodies (?). So much for my trips down memory lane.

Guns n' Roses? Gone.

Poison? Plenty of phrases I'm just not ready to explain - or hear my child repeat.

Quiet Riot? Quite the eye-opener when your then 2-year-old parrots back "girls rock your boys" on the first time she's heard the song.

Ugly Kid Joe's "I hate everything about you?" (purchased after being dumped of my now-husband on Valentine's Day) Out of the question when you're trying to knock "hate" out of someone's vocabulary.

Keep laughing. I've probably got them all.... And for the record, my spouse is the bigger problem, with his penchant for burning custom compact discs.

While I'm not prepared to get rid of my compact disc collection just yet, there are some that are admittedly just cluttering up my bedroom. I could probably get rid of those demo CDs from my tenure at the college newspaper, but haven't. Frankly, no one would take them.

There are places you can go to recycle those CDs. Or you can be crafty and do something with them. I've seen them as elements in scrapbook pages. But there's much, much more that people have apparently tried in that bored moment on a rainy afternoon.

Make-stuff.com suggests these ideas (and many more):

• Christmas light reflectors or decorations
• Coasters
• Candle displays
• Recrafted into bowls

But the most creative use of old music I've seen is this: turn them into weights. Maybe for your New Year's Resolutions, you can tackle two bad habits?

Cutting back costs isn't just happening in your kitchen

Are you cutting back on what you pay for groceries? Making substitutions to save on cash?

Guess what: You aren't alone.

Major food companies are doing the same thing. And you'll be paying the price in the convenience foods you buy.

Cheaper spices. Ingredient swaps. Nothing is sacred - not even your chocolate, which is a little less so. Hershey is swapping vegetable oil for cocoa butter, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Some companies are altering ingredients on such a small level that most consumers would never notice. Spokeswoman Nicole Reichert says Cargill has seen increased demand from food makers for dairy substitutes such as enzyme-modified dairy ingredients and starches and hydrocolloids. Starches and hydrocolloids are thickening and stabilizing agents that can replace costlier ingredients like nonfat milk solids in ice cream, processed cheese, yogurt, sour cream and dairy drinks. Adding enzymes to dairy ingredients can substitute milk or cream in some products.

Appetizing, isn't it? Maybe it's time to tinker with the idea of a home-cooked meal or two.