Growing Food and Kids

Thanks to an eat-local challenge from Mother Nature Network and Kitchen Gardeners International, families across America will be declaring their food independence tomorrow by eating local, sustainable foods at July 4th celebrations. Want to join them? Visit Mother Nature Network’s interactive map to find a recipe using foods that are in season in your state.

The Food Independence challenge has gotten me thinking not only about what we’ll eat tomorrow, but how what we eat reflects our freedom. When I was a kid complaining about helping in the garden, my raised-in-the-Cold-War dad used to tell me that we needed to know how to make our own food in case the Russians ever took over. (I assumed the Russians were planning to close all the grocery stores.) While I laugh about that now, I do love the independence that comes with growing your own food, or eating the food of other local growers.

When you have to depend on outsiders for food, you never know what you’re getting. Might be spinach with Salmonella. Might be beef from a sick cow that had to be pushed with a forklift into the slaughter line. And when you make a conscious effort to eat local foods, you get to know the people growing the food (if you’re not growing it yourself). You discover foods in your hometown that you never knew about, and you learn about the cycles of the earth and the food system and how it all works perfectly. And you get to eat food that truly tastes good, tastes real.

So what local foods are on my menu for July 4th? Mother Nature Network’s recommended recipe for my state (Alabama) is fried okra with onions. (Nobody said low-fat, just local.) While my family loves fried okra, we like to eat it out of our garden and ours won’t come in heavily for another couple of weeks. We do have a little left in the freezer from last year, so maybe I’ll thaw it out for the occasion.

Aside from okra, we have Alabama-grown peaches that we’ll probably eat tomorrow in a pie or homemade ice cream. We have yellow squash from our garden, and I’ll top my barbecue sandwich with dill pickles I made from our cucumbers last year. I hope to make an early morning run to the farmer’s market for fresh blueberries.

So maybe our entire menu won’t be local, but I’m pretty sure we won’t be eating anything shipped from China — or even California — either.

What will you be eating for the Fourth?