Tips and Resources I Use for Local Eating

A few weeks ago, a few of my fellow Knox Vegas residents emailed me to let me know that they were interested in some resources for local eating.  This post contains a few local market reviews but I hope the other information is helpful to the rest of my readers.  Please jump in and post in the comments if you have any other helpful resources.

Marcus and I first started trying to eat local about seven years ago.  At the time, this wasn't an easy thing to do.  Our "official" farmer's market had been turned into a discount food store.  The one actual farmer's market was located out in West Knoxville in a church parking lot where it got so hot that we actually saw people pass out when we were there.  There were very few organic growers and I can remember a farmer screaming at me when I asked him if he grew anything without chemicals.  "Don't you know that you can't grow anything around here without chemicals?" he told me snidely and when I asked him how our grandparents managed to do it, he tried to convince me that farmers everywhere had been using petrochemicals on their crops since this nation was founded. Needless to say, it was quite the experience.  Trying to buy free range beef meant taking out another mortgage on your home so you could afford it.  Fruit and vegetable resellers ran rampant.  There's nothing like seeing a "farmer" selling produce out of a box labled 'Florida Tomatoes'.

Compared to those times, It's a lot easier now.  Knoxville has never really been on the forefront of trends.  I joke around that we're about 15 years behind Seattle but the local foods movement is picking up steam.  We now have a farmer's market every day of the week, except Sunday and Monday.  More and more farmers are growing organically so there's a lot more choices available to consumers.  I now see local chefs at our downtown market on a regular basis and I'm hoping that the Three Rivers Co-op move will give them more space to expand their local offerings.

I'm not a local foods expert.  I think it's such a huge concept that no one person can really consider themselves an expert unless they devote the bulk of their time to it.  But it is a big part of my life and it's gotten to the point where so many of the choices that I had to think about at the beginning, now just come naturally to me.  This isn't a comprehensive post by any stretch of the imagination - it's just a post to help those starting out on the local foods bandwagon.

Tips for Eating Local:

Tip #1 - Just Try
The first tip I can offer is just to try.  Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.  Start by deciding to eat as seasonally as you can.  Start by trying to eat one local meal a week.  Start by taking a food that you often buy and pledge to buy that food locally. Start with one small thing and make that a habit before you do anything else.  That's how we got to the point where we are now.  We started by eating seasonally and buying as much produce as we could at local farmer's markets.  Then we started substituting local beef for one meal a week.  We increased that and started trying to eat mainly local fruit.  Then we searched out local grains and ventured into canning.  Little steps add up.  Making our own bread, canning our produce, dehydrating stuff from our garden, eating seasonally and locally is so second nature that for the most part, it's easy.  

Tip #2 - It's Not a Competition
 A word of warning - don't get caught up in the competitive aspect of it - I'm only saying this because I'm guilty of it. I participate in a blog challenge were everyone agrees to cook one local meal a week.  When I first started, I felt a little embarassed by some of the other participants meals - stuff with local olive oil, flours.  I decided then that I was going to eat the localest local meal that ever localed.  Needless to say, this is completely against the whole idea of the challenge which is to make local eating more of a part of your everyday life. 

Tip #3 - Adjust Your Menus & Shop Your Farmers' Markets
You're going to need to adjust the way you cook as you get more into local eating.  I used to plan out my meals for the week, write a shopping list and go to the store.  Now I head to the market, buy what looks good and then figure out my meals for the week.  That's where cookbooks based around the season and recipe sites that show recipe by vegetable come in really handy.

One of the best ways you can start eating more local foods is by going to one of the local farmers' markets in the area.  It's the best way to get an idea of what's in season.  You'll learn that when local corn is at the market, you buy it.  You can begin to understand that eating locally in Tennessee means that salads in the summer will need to consist of something besides lettuce.  You'll learn that the tomatoes available in late June have nothing on the tomatoes that will arrive later.  You'll learn that fall broccoli is almost always sweeter than spring broccoli and that some kinds of winter squash taste like chestnuts.

Tip #4 - Challenge Yourself
Challenge yourself by doing something fun and/or weird!  Last year I made cheese.  Seriously - I was so pleased with myself that it was ridiculous.  I got major bragging credo on that accomplishment alone.  I was able to serve a roasted vegetable sandwich with homemade bread, homemade cheese and vegetables from our garden.  I was so proud of that.  Another example - I've never been a big baker but about a year ago, when the bakery that made our favorite peasant bread shut down, we tried making no-knead bread.  It was so easy and so good that we've never gone back to buying bread.  I've also developed a newfound interest in baking that I might never have had without the satisfaction that I got from baking that first loaf.  Buy a vegetable that you've never seen before.  Just do something different and see what happens 

Tip #5 - Enlist the Help of Your Family & Friends
Talk to your friends and family about local options.  One of our neighbors had a sourdough starter that she's had for years.  She was nice enough to let me have some.  I posted on the blog about a search for local flour and someone emailed me with information that might help me track some down.  I grow lots of different tomato varieites each year and I share how they do with my farmer friends.  Get your friends and family together for a local potluck once a month - encourage one another.

Tip #6 - Sometime There Will Be Setbacks
A few years later, Marcus and I decided to only eat local fruit that year.  That was the year that we had one of the warmest springs on record, followed by several nights in the high teens.  We managed to save our strawberries by covering them with plastic and putting lights under there with them, but farmers in the area were hit hard - some of them went out of business because of it.  All the tree fruits lost their blossoms that yea,r along with all the berries that needed to flower on the previous year's wood.  We ate a lot of melon that year.  This year, farmers all over the Northeast lost their entire tomato crop to late blight.  Farming is hard, uncertain work and if you pledge to support your local farmers, you'll have to find workarounds when they encounter setbacks.

Market Reviews:

There are three local farmer's markets that I know of in Knoxville.  I've been to the one in Oak Ridge some time ago and enjoyed it but since I live close to downtown, I don't go to many of the markets in the surrounding area.

Market Square - this is the market that I'm at every Saturday morning. This is the market where Marcus and I sell heirloom tomatoes every spring.  I'm very biased towards this market because I've been a part of its community since the day it started.  I've felt like a proud parent as I've watched it grow over the years.  I trust the farmer's here to tell me how they grow their food. I've watched their kids grow up and we've shared recipes and garden tips.  Saturdays from 9-2, Wednesdays from 11-2

Knoxville Farmers' Market in Sequoyah Hills - This is a very nice market and they tend to have a little more choice than the market downtown.  However, you're going to pay for that choice. I hesitate to say this because I may make a few people angry but there a few reasons why I don't like this market better.  I don't like that they market themselves as the REAL farmer's market.  I've been turned off because a few times I've gone and I've seen hybrid tomatoes marketed as heirlooms, probably to get a premium price.  I've dealt with line jumping and pushing here as well.  However, some of the same farmer's that sell at Market Square sell here.  I also visit here at least once a month to buy beef or chicken from Laurel Creek Farms and they're good people. Tuesdays & Fridays 3-6pm

New Harvest Park Farmers' Market - I'm ashamed to say I've never been to this market.  With our garden pumping out produce and my visits to my main stay market, I just haven't gone.  I hope to get there before the season ends and when I do, I'll post an update. Thursday 3-6pm

Cookbooks I use:

One of the best helps for me has been to make sure that my cookbook collection contains as many cookbooks in it that make local, seasonal eating easier. These are all cookbooks I either own or check out from the library all the time.  I'm sure there are other helpful books - please let me know in the comments below!

These cookbooks are arranged around seasons:
Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmers' Markets 
A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen: Easy Seasonal Dishes for Family and Friends 
Fresh Food Fast: Delicious, Seasonal Vegetarian Meals in Under an Hour

These are all-purpose cookbooks but I find them all very helpful:
Passionate Vegetarian
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food

If you want to try preserving, here are some great books:
The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving: Over 300 Recipes to Use Year-Round 
Ball Blue Book of Preserving
Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving 
The Joy of Pickling

These are the books that have inspired me to eat locally:
This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader - this is the book that first got me interested in local eating.  It's a fun read and makes you think without being preachy.
Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet 
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life 
Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food

Recipe Sites Online:

There are tons of recipe sites online that I love but these sites in particular are very helpful when you're trying to figure out how to cook the strange vegetable you bought at the market.

Mariquita Farm
Live Earth Farms
Nobel Foods Farm
Green Earth Institute

The list of blogs that I read that talk about local foods is really too extensive for this post.  I'll try to feature some of them over the next few months because they've helped me a lot.

Local eating is the way I support my local businesses and neighbors.  It's the way I show that I honor the hard work that farmers have to do to stay afloat.  It's the way I It's also the way I show the food companies that I don't like the way they do business and I won't support them.  The less money I spend on their food, the less money they have to fund campaigns that try to convince us that Froot Loops are healthy.

Last but not least, let me know if any of you would be interested in a local foods potluck every couple of months. I'd be more than happy to host it at my house as long as you promise to ignore the never ending cycle of renovations that would surround us.  My kitchen is a disaster (those of you who live here with me in ONK will appreciate how difficult cooking in old kitchens can be) but I'd love to plan a canning get together next year if any of you want help getting started canning.

PS - Thanks for the help from the Twitter community.   Marsula, KitchenMage, EatLocalChall & SweetSavoryLife all weighed in with helpful tips.  Please check out their blogs.  I enjoy all of them.

Comments

[Amy Broyles]

Great post, and very helpful!! I am also doing some canning and dehydrating, and would love to spend a day doing that with my neighbors. Also interested in local foods potlucks - since my house is also a disaster of renovation debris, I will volunteer to host one too!

[Beth]

Great suggestions! I was raised eating what my parents, grandparents and extended family raised in their gardens and on their farms. My grandfather was even a pig farmer, so some of my favorite childhood memories are making sausage in my grandparents basement with all of my cousins. As I got older and moved away from home though, I did as most young adults do-chose convenience over quality and spent all of my money at big box stores. It's just been in the past couple of years that I've really begun focusing on eating locally as much as possible, and it's such a satisfying feeling knowing that I'm helping my community! My hope is that the eat local movement will continue to grow strong and really hurt some of these big corporations that are slowly killing our country!

[Maria]

Great tips and info! We try to eat local, it is easy in the summer but in the winter we do our best!

[Bill Everhart]

I really enjoyed this article, and as a farmer who sells at farmer's markets locally I admit I have a vested interest. I have never sold at Market Square for various reasons but I might have to give it a try next season. There is another market in Knoxville that was not mentioned, it is the Dixie Lee Farmer's Market in Farragut. While only in it's second year, it has really improved this year. Thanks to everyone who supports the local farmers.

[Mangochild]

What a great post. And I'd agree, your tips are square on. It might seem daunting, but just jumping in, particularly in the fall and summer, is a good way to start. Just doing whatever one can, at this particular time and moment, is often enough.

[TNLocavore]

Amy, Hopefully we'll be getting walls in the half of our house that doesn't have them in the next few weeks. Once that happens, I'll give you a call and we can see if anyone wants to join us for a potluck!

[TNLocavore]

Beth,

My husband grew up here and can remember when it was time to slaughter the pigs each year up at his grandparents. My mom grew up on a farm but my Dad was a Navy brat. However, he's the one who wanted a huge garden and had one every year. I think that's the reason why I love vegetables so much. Eating peas and cherry tomatoes straight from the vines is so fun and so tasty. In my 20s, I thought eating healthy was about eating "healthy" food. Since then, I've learned that eating healthy is about eating real food. So much tastier too.

[TNLocavore]

Hi Maria! Looking forward to seeing you in a few days. I do what I can in the winter too. The thing is - we can always do better but we shouldn't let that stop us from doing something. This year, I canned quite a bit but I didn't get enough tomatoes to can plain ones. I'll need to buy those. But I did can a lot of sauce, ketchup and other stuff.

[TNLocavore]

Hi Bill! I'd love to know the name of your farm and what markets you sell at! Thanks for posting and letting me know about the Farragut market. I think you'd really like selling at the Market Square. I remember how tiny it used to be and now it fills all of market square and down into the road by Krutch Park.

[TNLocavore]

Mangochild, fall is a great time to jump in, especially in our area. We've still got markets loaded with most of the summer produce and we've got fall items coming in.

[tracy monday]

another source for local food is the market in maryville. To find out more visit the website at themarkettn.com there is local meat, fresh seafood, local milk, and local vegetables. a great cafe called sistercats, serves meals made from scratch. The owners of the building, both maryvillians remodeled an old eyesore and created a beautiful new place to shop

[TNLocavore]

Thanks Tracy! I've been wanting to make my way out there to check out The Market.

[Barb Pierce]

the market in Knoxville's Laurel Church of Christ is a great market, with lots of choice and they carry "different" produce...a few vendors carry gourmet, heirloom, organically grown, and it's a very friendly market...don't know of anything negative to say about this market...try it, you'll be pleasantly pleased!!!
Barb

[Barb Pierce]

JUST READ YOUR SITE, SPECIFICALLY YOUR COMMENT ABOUT THE WEST KNOXVILLE MARKET AT SEQUOAH HILLS...YOU KNOW SOMETHING? IT'S A REAL SHAME THAT PEOPLE LIKE YOU FEEL THEY HAVE TO SLAM OTHER MARKETS, JUST TO PERHAPS MAKE YOUR MARKET FALSELY APPEAR BETTER? IT'S A SHAME.....AND SHAME ON YOU AND YOUR BLOG!
EVERYONE WORKS REALLY HARD TO BRING QUALITY GOODS TO MARKET, AND I MEAN ALL THE FARMERS MARKETS! READING FALSE 'STORIES' (FIGHTS IN LINES? NEVER HEARD OR SEEN OF THIS THERE!)....SELLING HEIRLOOMS BUT THEY ARE REALLY HYBRIDS? SHISH! THIS STUFF IS SAD! THIS BLOG IS ABOUT SLAMMING OTHER FARMERS MARKETS AND IT DOESN'T SAY MUCH FOR YOU! HOPE PEOPLE KNOW THIS BLOG IS A SHAM.

BARB

[P B Rule, Hillside Bakery]

RE: Your comments about local Farm markets.

I think your comments are your opinions and less well informed than they might be. Having sold and bought at four of our area farm markets, I think each market has vendors that sell at varying prices and labeling of items also varies. This alone does not make one market preferable over another.

Customers may question or query vendors about their produce, baked goods, or processed foods. Is this what you did or did you just observe or assume some item was or was not an heirloom variety? How did you reach this conclusion? Substantiation of such a statement should be included. More than just your opinion is required to inform the public.

Bloggers can bring information to light or they can merely express their opinions, biases, etc. In your statements about which farm market you prefer, you stated your bias in that you live near downtown. I suggest that all the farm markets are important to our community and that a less biased, true analysis of the strengths of each market might prove more useful to members of our community than your flippant summary of the three you noted (there are more than three farm markets in the greater Metro area including Maryville, and Dixie Lee Farm markets). In fact, the Knoxville New-Sentinel listed, repeatedly, all the area farm markets in the spring when farmers began taking their produce to market.

In conclusion, I suggest you do more background research and try a little harder to shed more light on farm markets in our area, rather than just blogging from the hip.
P B Rule
Hillside Bakery
Knoxville, TN

[TNLocavore]

By giving my review of a market, I'm giving my opinion and sharing my personal experiences. Nowhere did I say that these were the absolute truths of these markets. You may have your own opinions and experiences of our local markets and you are certainly welcome to share those opinions and reviews at your own blog. A blog is very simple to start and it would be great to have more blogs out there that focus on local foods in Tennessee.

For the record, I've grown over 65 different kinds of heirloom tomatoes. I'm very experienced with the different varieties of tomatoes that are grown and when I see a variety grown that I know with certainty is a hybrid being sold with a sign that lists it as a heirloom, I can state and give my opinion that I don't like that. I informed the farmer selling those tomatoes that the sign wasn't correct. They apologized and said it was a simple mistake. The next week they had the same sign up and when they saw me, they pretended they were busy and wouldn't make eye contact with me. As for the line cutting and pushing - this has happened to me repeatedly and to my husband. When I mentioned it at a party, several people there said that the same thing had happened to them. Again - you may not like that I stated that but it has happened to me and I can let other people know about that. There have been signs out in front of the market that state "The REAL Farmers Market". Again - I think it's in poor taste
because the other farmers markets in the city are no less real than this market. Despite these things, as you'll see I made it clear that I liked this market and that a lot of the farmers there were good people. Again - if you don't like my review, you're more than able to start your own blog and talk about your experiences and opinions at that blog.

There are three markets in the city of Knoxville (Except the one I didn't know abt in Farragut and I'm very happy that Bill told me about it). I haven't been to the other markets in the surrounding areas, except for the Oak Ridge market, and I made sure to mention that. If you'd like a more comprehensive listing and thorough examination of the strengths & weaknesses of each market, please - start a blog and post about them. Just understand that you'll be giving your opinions and experiences in your reviews and there are going to be people that won't like your opinions and might accuse you of being biased, particularly if you're comparing markets that you do and don't sell at. ;-)

Of course I'm biased towards the downtown market - I very clearly stated that "I'm very biased towards this market because I've been a part of its community since the day it started. I've felt like a proud parent as I've watched it grow over the years." So yes - I very clearly stated my bias.

For the record, the entire premise of my blog is about celebrating local foods in Tennessee. I constantly encourage people in our area to shop at their local farmers markets and buy local foods. If anyone actually follows my suggestions, that's more people buying more local foods, no matter what market they might shop at and that helps all of us, especially farmers. :-)

[twitter.com/jennyjumpup]

Wow. Okay ... I was going to comment to thank you for writing about farmer's markets other than Market Square! Since I'm new to town, it has been the only one I really knew about until now and seeing that I live closer to Farragut, the others will be more convenient especially if they're open on days other than Wednesday and Saturday.

On another note, I'd love to get together for a pot-luck sometime!

[Becca]

Wow - who peed in you alls cornflakes? I have to say I do agree with some of your impressions of the various markets but I didn't think you were biased in your reviews. I appreciate you posting about your experiences - I didn't think you were being deragatory since you made a point of saying you liked the blog.

If people would look at your site and be inspired to eat more local foods, that would be great for all the farmers here.

[Bill]

Hi TNLocalvore!

Sorry it has taken me so long to respond, this rain is reeking havoc with my fall crops.

My farm is the Purring Dog Farm and we are in Sweetwater. During peak season we sell on Tuesday and Friday at the FARM market on Kingston Pike and on Saturdays at Dixie Lees Farmers Market in Farragut. We have a variety of vegetables, and while not certified organic, we do not use any chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbacides. This rain has probably wiped out my fall crops with standing water in the field so I will have limited appearances the rest of the year. I do send out an email when I am attending one of the markets listing what I will have and would be happy to add you to the list if you have any interest.

Thanks, and have a great weekend.

Best,

Bill Everhart, April, Caitlin, and Lucky (the purring dog)

[TNLocavore]

Thanks for getting back to me Bill! This weather has been crazy, hasn't it? From two years of not enough rain to this past growing season - nuts. I'll be honest - I don't think twice about organic certification. It's a lovely concept but it's been compromised so much by large corporations. I'm just as likely to buy from farmers who give their word that they're organic as certified farmers. I'd love to be on your list. I'll send you an email!

[TNLocavore]

BTW - Love the name of your farm!