What if you could only eat food grown within a few miles of your home for the next ten days? For most of us, that would mean no bread, no coffee, and no olive oil. A group of 57 Aquidneck Island residents decided to take on the challenge, and Rhode Island Public Radio’s Alex Braunstein joined one of them for lunch at her home in Newport.
Standing at a small white counter in her kitchen, Sharyn Singer peels and grates a large clove of garlic. The bulb is grown at Big Black Dog Farm in Newport, less than a mile from her apartment. Sitting atop her dining room table is a colorful pile of tomatoes.
“I’ve got some yellow ones, some orange ones, some beautiful red ones, so let’s try a little variety,” says Singer.
She throws a few chopped tomatoes into a pan and picks up a green zucchini. She puts it through a device called a spiralizer and long strands come out the other end.
“It’s almost like a fettuccini,” says Singer.
Veggie noodles are on the menu as an alternative to pasta because there is no wheat grown on Aquidneck Island. Singer has been following a strict diet. For more than a week, everything had to be grown or raised on the island or caught in Narragansett Bay.
As you can imagine, eating this local makes meal planning more complicated. Singer says on the first day of the challenge, she didn’t pack a lunch. She assumed she could grab something local in between errands. Maybe an apple.
“The only thing that local places had were vegetables you’d have to cook – not even a carrot you could eat raw. And I was like I’m going to be hungry if I don’t do something, I’ve got to go home and cook the food that I’ve got!”
Why eat this way? Singer took part in the Aquidneck Food Challenge, organized by a nonprofit called Aquidneck Community Table. Bevan Linsley runs the group. She’s concerned about what food is available on the island and how it gets there. One of her favorite stories is about a farmer in Portsmouth who grows cabbages.
“He sells the cabbages to a food distributor in Boston. So he trucks them up to Boston and the food distributor packages them and ships the cabbages back to Portsmouth to be sold on the island.”
All of those extra steps add to the cost of food once it reaches the shelf. They also require a lot of fuel to keep the trucks running, even when they’re sitting in traffic south of Boston. So those cabbages are now creating carbon emissions, just to get back to the place where they started.
Linsley hopes the food challenge draws attention to these issues and other challenges within the local food system. From her perspective, there’s a lot of work to do. In Rhode Island, the average size of farms is shrinking, farmers are aging, and the cost of farmland is among the highest in the country.
And Linsley says climate change makes Aquidneck Island even more vulnerable than other parts of the state.
“When the bridges go down we’ve got maybe 2 to 3 days’ worth of food on the island and no plan for what happens after that.”
A plan is exactly what Linsley’s group wants to develop. She is following the lead of Food Solutions New England, a network of local food advocates. They’ve created an ambitious goal for New England to produce 50% of its food by the year 2060. Right now, the region is at just 10%.
Back in the kitchen, Singer finishes her zucchini pasta with some local butter; a product new to the island. When participants in the local eating challenge realized they had no oils or fats to cook with, they persuaded a dairy farm in Middletown to start making butter.
“It’s a very rich yellow color and it looks like what real old fashioned butter probably looked like. It’s just the real deal.”
The butter sold so well that the farm still makes it even though the official Aquidneck Food Challenge is over.
Singer says she made it through all ten days without cheating and she lost weight. She’d like to see the local eating challenge go statewide next year. But for now, winter is coming and with it, a whole new set of challenges for growing and eating local.
