Eat Local for Thanksgiving
By Shawn Dell Joyce
Eating local embodies the spirit of the first Thanksgiving, where Puritans and Wampanoags sat down together to share a meal that consisted mainly of shellfish, eels, wild fowl (including swans and eagles) and other local foods that they could gather or grow.
When we get our foods locally, we eat in season and celebrate what’s available. Absent from the first Thanksgiving feast were modern traditional dishes like corn on the cob (all corn was dried by that time), pumpkin pie (they had no sugar), cranberry sauce (no sweetener other than Maple syrup), and stuffing (they served pudding).
We have altered the menu over the years to the point where we rehash and serve the same dishes over and over. This year, why not have a real Thanksgiving by celebrating the local harvest and the hardworking hands that grew it? Buy your dinner ingredients from local farms and prepare what is seasonally available in our area. Your food dollars will stay local, nourishing the farm family, farm hands, and local community. This is an act of gratitude that bolsters the local economy during tight times.
Right now, you can find turkeys that live the way nature intended, chasing bugs, scratching in the grass and frolicking in the fall leaves instead of penned up one-on-top-of another in factory farms. These turkeys will cost a little more than their supermarket counterparts because they are not mass produced, or government subsidized. They also taste more “turkeyish” because they are not force-fed an unnatural diet. As a result, free-range birds are healthier, and better for you as well.
We Americans are used to cheap and plentiful food; we spend less on food than any other developed nation in the world. On average, Americans spend only 2% of their disposable income on meat and poultry, compared to 4.1% in 1970. This quest for cheap and plentiful has seen the average size of a farm bloat while the number of farms and farmers has decreased. In the 1960s, one farmer supplied food for 25.8 persons in the U.S. and abroad. Today, that same farmer feeds 144 people.
For farming to be an economically viable profession, we must make it more profitable for the farmers by eliminating the middle man. Right now, farmers get around eight cents of every dollar we spend on food in chain grocery stores. When you buy direct from the farm, the farmer gets the whole dollar, and that dollar has the economic impact of two dollars in the local community.
To find local Thanksgiving dinner ingredients:
www.localharvest.org
Sweet Potatoes, potatoes, onions, squash and other vegetables (farm stores):
Blooming Hill Farm, 1251 Route 208, Washingtonville 782-7310
Hoeffner Farms, 405 Goodwill Rd., Montgomery 457-3453
Jones Farm, 190 Angola Rd. Cornwall, 534-4445
Lawrence Farms & Orchards, 39 Colandrea Rd. Newburgh, 562-4268, www.lawrencefarmsorchards.com
Pies and Cider (many of the stores listed above also carry these):
Soons Orchards, 23 Soons Circle, New Hampton, 374-5471, www.soonsorchards.com
Walnut Grove Farms-285 Youngblood Rd. Montgomery, NY, Ned Roebuck, www.walnutgrovefarms.net
845-313-4855
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