Eat Local and Slim Down

I thought this week that I would share a personal lesson about the benefits of buying fresh and local. Over this past summer, I have made a conscious effort to make every meal we eat at home a largely local meal and have been planning meals with that goal in mind, but also with a determination to keep within the food budget that has evolved over the years.

As you know if you read my rants and raves, I have never tried to convince anyone that buying local is cheaper. If you hope to keep eating as much local meat as you have probably been eating when you were buying heavily subsidized and unnaturally corrupted corporate meat products, it will cost you more.

My strategy was to deliberately reduce the amount of meat we were eating each week. The average American eats nine ounces of meat per day, working out to nearly four pounds per week. And I was hoping to reduce that to more like two pounds per week each for my husband and me. But that figure was based on our wanting to eat more locally produced meat while staying within that budget.

It was easy during the summer to do that, and while we did eat wild salmon and Atlantic shrimp during that time, almost all of our meat consumption this past summer was local. I highlighted eggs in at least one meal a week, and sometimes for as many as three meals a week, we ate only vegetables.

At least once a week, we ate Cavanna's Pasta -- almost always with just vegetables, not a meat sauce. Except when we luxuriated in a really great grilled steak, there were always more veggies on the plate than meat.

The surprise revealed itself this week when we had to pull out our fall and winter clothes -- my jeans and jackets and for my husband a sport coat he had not needed in many months. And lo and behold! My jeans are much roomier than they were last spring when I put them away, and my husband's fairly new jacket was also hanging loose from the shoulders. We have both lost several pounds without a serious effort to do so.

Maybe the diet gurus are correct -- it can be counterproductive to focus on losing weight, which makes the whole process a negative experience. But a focus on eating healthier can be a much more positive adventure. Buying fresh and eating local certainly involves less angst and agony. And in my family, we didn't even know we were losing weight -- we were having too much fun eating well.

See you at the market!

Jean

This Week at Our Reston Market
Wednesday 3:30–7pm
11890 Sunrise Valley Dr.
Map

Plan ahead for Annie's last demo at the market, next week on Oct. 12, beginning around 4 p.m. -- earlier than usual because of the impending darkness.

Which leads me to the next item: Starting this week, the market will close at 6:30 p.m. We have no lighting at the lot, and our vendors cannot do business or pack up in the dark, so for this last month we will close at 6:30pm -- and maybe earlier for the last two weeks. We will keep you informed.

This market will end as planned the last Wednesday in October, but we will return for a shortened two-hour market on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving so that you can pick up your turkeys and buy anything else you need for the holiday weekend. We will be open from 3:30-5:30pm for that special market. And you can thank Keith and the Hartke family for accommodating you, our great shoppers.

You are cordially invited to shop with your favorite vendors all winter at one of our year-round markets -- one of which is just down Sunrise Valley Drive/Hunter Mill Road in Oakton. That market will be open every Saturday, weather permitting, through the winter from 10 a.m.-1 p.m. and will include many of the vendors that serve you at the Reston market. As we reconfigure that market for the winter, I will list the vendors from Reston who will be joining our existing market there, where Angelic Beef, Tyson Farms and Heritage Farm and Kitchen have been with us from the beginning of that market.

Sorry to take up the update space with PA announcements for the week -- but you know by now how great a fall market can be, and all I can add is wait until you see the celery at Heritage Farm! It is astoundingly beautiful (and also delicious) -- mainly because you will never have seen it quite this way. I am going to take pictures.