The locavore's dilemma

The more I think about what I want the focus of this blog to be, the more I think about what it really means to eat local. At first, I wanted the majority of my posts to be simple reports about the local food available to my fellow Montanans and profiles of the people that supply this food to us while slowly switching my own diet to concentrate on local foods. Yet the more I think about how to switch to a mainly local diet, the more I realize how difficult it can be up here, especially trying to begin this new habit a few weeks before the winter solstice. Simply put, we live in a pretty desolate environment six months out of each year.

I’m currently reading a book about a woman who lives in Brooklyn who only ate food grown (or harvested) within 250 miles from her home. Two hundred fifty miles from Brooklyn will get you fresh lobster and maple syrup. Two hundred fifty miles from Missoula will get you Havre. No offense to Havre but it’s not a place I would go to satisfy my craving for shellfish. 

                                                                                   

So what are we locavores to do in Montana? How do we subsist mainly on a diet of locally grown food when little is growing here? So from now on, in addition to celebrating all those wonderfully hardworking creative people who strive to bring us great local food and drink, I am going to strive to find ways to sustain a local diet and share those ways with anyone who wants to try to do the same