Kim's inadvertent Local Food Meme

Recently, my friend Kim blogged about Chris Bedford's questions to ask yourself about local food. She participated in Michigan Friend's Center day long conference about local food. I love the Quaker mentality...it is so similar to the Catholic social teaching. Just eh other day, Deacon Romeo Leone was talking about the wisdom of knowing your own neighbors. I know Kim didn't plan on this being a meme, but I am going to make it so. Please think about your answers to these questions...blog about them if you like....here are my answers:

What was your Soylent Green moment? Have you had a moment of "food epiphany" when you decided something needed to change? What was that epiphany?

I have always preferred local food and am surprised and thrilled it has become fashionable to do so now. My food epiphany this year is that the poor don't get a chance to eat local food very often, and I want to help in this regard. My church is participating in Dexter Plant a Row for the Hungry. I can't wait to give it a try.

Do you know your nearest neighbors? Draw the block around your house with every house (or each house in your nearest vicinity). Label each with the names of the neighbors you know.

I do know some of the neighbors that live around me - Tina and Jim, Ann and Bill, Dave, Martha and Steve, Marjorie, Don and Pam. But I can do better....


What are your real-world skills and abilities? List what you can grow, make, do, or manifest.

I am good at organizing people around ideas. I can grow herbs, I am a good cook. My gift might be to get others energized around feeding the poor. I should cook more for the poor.

What foods are you currently growing and could you be growing in your own yard? List them, including things like bees, chickens, fruit trees.

Just herbs...I have too many critters. I should try a serviceberry again. I have started some rhubarb, and I want to grow some asparagus.

For extra credit: list your neighbors' skills and abilities. And for even more extra credit, on your neighborhood map, label any other sources of food like: a farmstand, an abandoned apple tree, a neighbor's overgrown patch of rhubarb.

I like Ruhlig's Farm and Lesser Farms, out on Island Lake Rd. west of Dexter where it becomes dirt and not suburbia.

So, what are your answers to these questions