Sustainable Living by Shawn Dell Joyce
Right now many of us are planning our Thanksgiving Dinner. We have a big decision; to sit in front of a meal of imported ingredients, grown around the world in places the Pilgrims never set foot, or, skip the supermarket and source all the ingredients for Thanksgiving dinner from local farms, mills and growers.
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 source our foods locally, we eat in season, and celebrate what’s grown in our region. 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 exact same dishes over and over. This year, 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 your 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.
As a matter of fact, none of our small local farms are government subsidized, so when you pay a little more for local produce, it is because you are paying the full cost to grow the food at a fair rate. Large farms that wholesale to chain grocers are subsidized by our tax dollars lowering the cost of goods on the supermarket shelf. This makes non-local groceries appear cheaper than locally grown foods, but there are hidden costs that must be paid in the long run by someone else. Like the loss of soil fertility, social costs of cheap labor and environmental devastation of shipping food over thousands of miles.
This year, as you and your family gather around the Thanksgiving feast, offer a prayer of gratitude for our small farmers and farm workers. Give thanks that we still have people in our region willing to grow quality food in a market flooded with cheap imports. Support these hard-working folks by eating locally grown foods at the holiday table, and year round. Let’s reject our national food system that makes “cheap” the highest priority, at a deep cost to the environment, the farmers, and future generations, and spend a little more on quality local food and farms.
To find local Thanksgiving Dinner ingredients:
Turkeys: Norbury Farms in Middletown 342-3788
Cranberries: Blooming Hill Farms in Washingtonville 782-7310
Pies: Soons Orchards in Middletown 374-5471, Walnut Grove Farm Montgomery 313-4855
Side dishes: Hoeffner Farm, 405 Goodwill Rd., Lawrence Farm 562-4268
Shawn Dell Joyce is the director of the Wallkill River School in Montgomery, www.WallkillRiverSchool.com
