Eating only what grows around you

The Rev. Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows would not seem like an obvious candidate for the eating local movement. Growing up, she didn’t eat many vegetables and those that were on the table were “always cooked within an inch of their lives.”

“I grew up in an African-American household,” she says. “Celery root was not part of our tradition.”

Her husband also did not come to the idea naturally: a native of the Bahamas, he considered vegetables to be more of a plate decoration than an actual part of the meal.

But Baskerville-Burrows, 41, had always liked to cook, and she started shopping at farmers markets beginning around 1999. A few years later, she started reading books including “Fast Food Nation,” which includes segments about the farm practices that go into mass-produced food. It prompted a closer look at how she could find healthier and tastier food.

“I started really looking at my diet,’” says Baskerville-Burrows, who is an Episcopal priest.

These days, Baskerville-Burrows says she buys about 85 percent of her food from producers in the Syracuse, N.Y., area, where she lives. She also grows tomatoes, herbs and other vegetables at home, and this year she worked with church members to plant a garden on church grounds that they hope will eventually supply a local food pantry with fresh produce.

Max Schulte / Special to msnbc.com Members of Grace Episcopal Church in Syracuse, N.Y., work on a community garden that will aim to give locally grown food to those in need.

Among locavore proponents, one popular pastime is the “eat local challenge,” in which participants try, usually for one month, to eat only food that comes from within their community. The rest of the year, many locavores are more realistic about the limits of their devotion.

Maiser drinks coffee and has a soft spot for Greek yogurt and Italian pasta. Gray’s family eats salsa and pesto and pasta, even though she suspects that some of the ingredients have traveled remarkably long distances. Even Smith has allowed things such as rice and olive oil into her home since ending the year of eating locally chronicled in “Plenty.”

But that doesn’t mean that a locavore’s kitchen looks anything like most Americans’. In order to eat locally through the winter without getting scurvy or facing a family revolt, locavores are forced to take on domestic efforts that most families haven’t tackled for generations. Gray’s extra freezer is stuffed with frozen summer foods plus half a cow she purchased from a local rancher, and she has aspirations to learn more about canning.

Baskerville-Burrows has a root cellar to keep food fresh through the winter. She freezes fresh produce and has been canning strawberries and tomatoes since 2006. Like a lot of people trying to learn long-forgotten food preservation skills, she admits she has approached it with a bit of trepidation.

“I can’t think of anything that’s gone horribly awry. I’ll tell you, though, when I opened up my first jar of tomato sauce, I went to the computer and looked up botulism,” she says.

Smith, the “Plenty” author, recalls frantic calls to her mother and grandmother as she tried to figure out how to do things like make jam.

One piece of advice she has to offer: Get started early in the day, because it takes longer than you might think.

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The same could be said for eating locally in general, since doing so often involves spending more time tracking down food and finding ways to cook things you might normally buy ready-made, like bread. Not surprisingly,  in most communities it’s hard to find processed food that is made exclusively from local ingredients.

Also, expect to see a spike in your food bill.

“I am keenly aware that my grocery budget –  it gives me heart attacks –  and so I know that there are a lot of people that can’t do that,” Gray says.

Baskerville-Burrows believes the extra cost is worth the tradeoffs, and she also feels she is paying a fair price for foods that keep local farmers in business.

“I’d rather spend my money putting good stuff in my body than worrying about what’s on it,” she says.

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