Eating Local is $#%#@ Expensive!

This is the first roadblock that Barb and I immediately encountered as we stocked up for our project. What becomes immediately apparent as you search labels for locally sourced products is how distributed our food supply chain has become. Now, sometimes that's OK--I love Bordeaux wine, parmasean cheese, and Argentinean beef and don't seem to have any issues with the distance THAT food has traveled to my plate. But I also don't have any issues with the *quality* of that food and to be fair, that food is also single ingredient food, not a melange of 31 ingredients like that of the BBQ sauce in my fridge (to be fair, the onion salt in the recipe is apparently organic--who knew this was an option?).

So we're finding quickly that the fewer ingredients in foods, the more expensive they seem to be--isn't that perverse? You pay less for a sceptic cocktail of chemicals that approximate the taste of the real thing. What an upside down world we've come to live in.

In any case, finding local replacements for the things I like to eat is already driving me to the edge. I paid $88.65 at the "Eat Local" store yesterday afternoon for a single plastic bag of food that just a day earlier at the local Fred Meyer yielded 4 similar sized bags. At this rate we're going to use our 2010 food budget by Labor Day.

Must find another path to make this work...thank goodness for the abundance of Walla Walla wines and Pyramid Summer Ale beer!