How to be a locavore, without sounding like a d**k

Hannah Wernet - 23 Mar 17

Why is it, that whenever someone identifies with a food “trend”, they instantly sound like an insufferable hipster? If someone tells me that they just visited this amazing new smokehouse, located in an Airstream trailer, that only uses locally sourced wild meats, I roll my eyes and groan. Pass me a Potnoodle, pack up your beard and go somewhere else with your delicious-sounding streetfood venture.

I find the word locavore particularly cringe-inducing. The word first popped up in 2006 to describe people who try to eat only foods that are grown locally. A fine and worthy goal, and yet I still can’t bring myself to identify with it.

I think it’s because announcing that you only eat local foods sounds to me like a not very subtle way of stating that you are much better-off than the pleb you are talking to. Local, artisanal, cheeses, wines, mustards and all the rest of it are likely to be considerably more expensive than their conventional brothers and sisters. Without the economies that come from the vast scale of factory production, often the only way of making a profit is to aim for the tweedy golfist market.  I know the quality is good, and the carbon footprint is miniscule, but if someone tries to sell me a jar of pesto for nearly a fiver, I can only assume that they live in Hay-on-Wye, and are completely divorced from reality.

Likewise, if someone tries to tell me, for example, that British white wine is just as good as French, I won’t believe them, suspect them of being a massive fan of Price Charles, and possibly into Freemasonry on the weekends.

When Granny was my age, cabbage was boiled, end of discussion, so you can imagine her delight when it became possible to eat something other than soggy brassicas in wintertime. I think that this is something that writers and bloggers promoting the locavore movement don’t quite grasp. They seem to think that only the wilfully stupid would eat tomatoes and bell peppers in winter. Of course Nigel Slater can come up with a chestnut and parsnip tarte tatin every week for the Guardian and make it look effortless and obvious. For the rest of us, staring down a veg box full of sprouts and turnips is enough to make you reach for a packet of fish fingers and some frozen peas.

But that all said, I want to eat locally, I don’t want tasteless strawberries that have flown half-way across Europe to die twenty minutes later in my fridge. I want to support local businesses and communities, and I don’t think it’s OK to use the resources of struggling countries so that I can have French beans in winter. What can I do as a mum, when my little one won’t eat cabbage, and everything local seems to cost a fortune?

Well, I have managed to eat pretty much exclusively local food for a couple of years now (coffee, wine and so on being the exceptions), and I do have some tips.

Embrace the humblest veg; carrots, spuds, onions, apples and so on. Even the fanciest, local, free-range grass-fed carrots are still a bargain. Pretty much everyone likes them, and won’t mind having them almost every day when they are in season. Variety is overrated, eat a ton of something when it is season, and then give yourself a well-deserved rest until next year. Likewise, frozen veg is a bit basic and boring, but fine in soups and stews. Also, everything tastes better fried in butter.

This is going to sound like high treason, but I’m not a fan of veg box schemes, at least not the ones I have seen here (I live in Austria, so it may be very different). It feels like too much of a chore to cook the things that someone chose for you, before they come next week with another pile of roots for you to tackle. You have a lot more freedom and flexibility at the farmer’s market, and even conventional supermarkets are stepping up their game these days.

When I first started, It was a bit of a game, a challenge, but now it has become habit. Veg out of season doesn’t have a lot of flavour, and kids won’t touch it, so half of it was going in the bin anyway. Searching for seasonal recipes on the internet is an enjoyable time-waster, and some of them I even cook. If my Granny had had Pinterest, she wouldn’t have needed to boil all that cabbage.

Importing perishable food from around the globe is an extremely recent development. To name “local food” as one of the top trends of the last few years, feels to me like looking at it from the wrong direction. I really don’t want to preach, but eating locally should not be a trend, to be ditched for something new in a couple of years , or the privilege of the well-heeled few, but a normal, everyday habit.

Hannah Wernet

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