Food Tracking: Assessing what I eat

If you have read my blog for any amount of time, and read any of the posts from the vote with your fork section, you probably have wondered if I really walk the walk in my everyday life ... or if this is all just a fantasy world.  Is it possible to eat mainly foods grown from local, sustainable sources?

I have decided to catalog my eating for the next week.  I think it will be interesting for you and for me both!  The reasons for doing this are several-fold:

1) To see how close I am, in my normal eating habits, to eating local and sustainable foods as much as possible.
2) To have the opportunity to talk about some of the products that we eat in our household that I haven't necessarily mentioned yet - maybe mention some new farms.
3) To see where my downfalls are and assess where I can make better choices.  I can already tell you that the main downfall is going to be eating out.  While most of the food that comes into our house is pretty well vetted, eating out is a whole different story.  I focus on going to local, non-chain restaurants, but there still aren't tons of day-to-day choices for restaurants using local and sustainably grown foods.

Although the temptation will be to eat "better" this week as I put my menus under a microscope, I am hoping to stick as close to our normal eating habits as possible.

Just as a technical note:  I will be formatting this as a post a day, with the possibility of a couple updates occurring to the current post each day -- I will have a better chance of sticking with this if it doesn't have to necessarily be one long post at the end of the day.

Comments

[Laura]

thought you might want to see this story from the Columbian, in Washington State.
http://www.columbian.com/05202005/clark_co/278352.cfm.

It's on the Fast Food Nation author and his comments about what's really in fast food--to students at a local school.

[McAuliflower]

Excellent diary idea Jen!

I just picked up a related book from Powell's this weekend, (that I plan on blogging about any day now) that you might have fun paging through. It's called "everything i ate, a year in the life of my mouth" by Tucker Shaw. He photos and logs *everything* he ate in 2004. Its a fun little obsessive book.

Unfortunately it is just that and not a move to healthier or more local foods.

Good luck- tracking down origins is a nice way to think about food.

[Derrick Schneider]

And you probably already know it, but Gary Paul Nabhan's _Coming Home To Eat_ chronicles his efforts to spend a year only eating foods from a small radius around his home (100 miles? it's small when you consider that he lives somewhere near Phoenix).

[jen]

Hi Derrick - I love Gary Paul Nabhan's book ... the crazy (and inspiring) thing about what he did is that he tried to eat foods *native* to his area. I (and most people) am so out of touch with what's actually native ... and there really aren't that many people to even ask about that. thanks for the reminder, though - I am going to have to do more research about foods native to the SF Bay area.

[muccapazza28]

From we, in Italy, it is still possible to eat produced that they come from much less than 100km. In our country it exists very more to the south that to the agricultural and food- north one strongly tradition, made of products of the garden, the aia, the fished one. Without to consider the large one tradizone to prepare the made fresh paste in house. Sure all it depends on the time that is had to disposition from being able to pass in kitchen but in Italy it is still possible and also many restaurants above all of quality work on this concept.
Crazycow28