The Half Way Mark!

It is hard to believe I have made it a full six months already without shopping in a grocery store or buying new things. March 1st represented the halfway point to my year long challenge of eating and living locally. In 6 months I have learned a lot about the local food movement and have gained valuable information about how I want to live after this challenge is completed. Things to take away already:

• I will continue abstaining from grocery stores and sticking with local suppliers. 
• I will expand my garden and preserve more so that my garden can feed me into the winter. 
• I will buy used cloths and on consignment where I have found better quality cloths this year and saved heaps of money. 
• I will cook with friends, share food and pass on recipes, building community through food. 

Sure my strict regime may seem a little unreasonable at times but I feel that it is important to make the difficult decisions in order to understand how each choice we make is apart of a ledger system. But after such a time when I no longer feel the struggle but am comfortable in my lifestyle I constantly think am I doing enough? Can I possibly get more local? Is it possible in other parts of the country more so then Prince George? I feel like there is much more I could be doing, cutting out take out and only cooking what I can buy here will help control where my food is doing from but at what cost, to my social life, to the small business I eat at, to my sanity? I don't have all the answers but I do know that so far my life has been possible and delightfully local and the next 6 months have only delicious things in store!

Cheers to the rest of the year,

Melanie 

"Believe you can and you are halfway there." -Theodore Roosevelt