Yesterday marked the triumphant beginning of the Eat Local Challenge at the Just Food Co-op and Northfield, Minnesota area, and I began with failure. Or maybe not....
Like so many mornings, I crawled out of bed and had a teapot on the stove before my first morning yawn. I woke up with its whistle and brewed a cup of Earl Grey tea. With the last sip, it hit me: Hmm. It's August 18th. Tea is not grown in the five-state area (MN, WI, IA, SD, ND) which our Eat Local Challenge celebrates. I had failed before I even started with my eat local adventures!
But then my pondering began.
The tea I sipped was not just any Earl Grey, but a carefully-rationed bit of Creamy Earl Grey from Light of Day Organics of Traverse City, Michigan. While the tea itself is a fair trade variety from several places across several seas, each Light of Day tea is delicately mixed with herbs and flowers that are produced biodynamically on the fruit-full Leelanau Peninsula of northern Michigan. The Creamy Earl Grey is an elixir of cornflower, lavender, calendula, bergamot and vanilla.
I picked up a little tin of this local (?) tea treasure during my time at home in Petoskey, Michigan this summer, and carried it along my midsummer adventures up the East Coast. Here in Minnesota, I have been kept warm through many a winter with the tea potions produced by Rishi Tea, a Milwaukee, Wisonsin-based company similar to Light of Day. Rishi purchases fair trade and organic teas, blending them with flavors of the Midwest and beyond. I am particularly a fan of their chai and white tea.
So how can I possibly think that this ocean-crossing commodity of all commodities (the tea-trading Dutch East India Company was the first-ever multinational corporation) fits anywhere but the contraband list of the Eat Local Challenge? The truth is, I don't. I think the Eat Local Challenge (and all of our eating beyond it) needs to be about the fruits of our gardens, our neighbor's trees, our farmer's fields. But I also think there is great complexity to a commitment to anything or all-things "local." It should fundamentally be about the food with roots in our communities. But while the fossil fuels hold out, we really are a part of a global community, and there are lots of ways our local communities are connecting beyond our borders with intentions for justice and sustainability: fair trade tea distributors and coffee roasters, cooperative chocolate processors, etc. etc.
I remembered my local-food commitment before putting a teapot on this morning. But I will not forget this pondering for the next 30 days, and the value of conversing with our communities about the complexity of these commitments as we savor each bite (or sip) of them.
