Family of Three Pledges 'No Grocery Stores for a Year'

http://www.takepart.com/news/2011/06/24/family-of-three-pledges-no-grocery-stores-for-a-year

For a family of three in suburban North Carolina, barbecue guests have been hard to come by this summer.

“Some friends have been reluctant to come to our house for a cookout, wanting to know ‘What kind of food is it? Normal or the hippie stuff?’” Gastonia resident Angie Halston tells TakePart.

On June 1, the twenty-something self-described "hip housewife" and her husband Eric committed to a year of grocery store abstinence. Until June of next year, local farms and farmers markets will dictate what ends up on the dinner table at home. Out with processed foods; in with whole grains and fresh fruits and veggies.

The rules to their pledge, Angie notes on her blog, are:

1. We can shop at any farmers markets or local farms whenever we want.

2. We can get "bits and pieces" twice a month. It must be organic, it must be very basic and something you cannot get at a farmers market or farm, and the total purchase must be less than $25.

Now a couple of weeks into their commitment, they and their two-year-old, Lucas, are experiencing the ripple effects of their back-to-the-basics diet, including happier grocery shopping experiences...and a slew of dubious reactions from friends and family.

“I’m slightly shocked by some of the responses we’ve had,” Angie says.

Angie's grandparents were among the doubters; they thought the Halstens were fad dieting.

“I reminded my grandpa that he grew up on a farm and ate exactly how I eat now. I think it’s crazy how ‘weird’ it is to eat how people have eaten historically up until the last fifty years or so,” she says.

Coupled with ample governments subsidies, agricultural advancements since the 1950s have drastically changed America's farming and food system. It was only 57 years ago that the number of tractors on farms exceeded the number of mules and horses for the first time. Today, food production in the U.S. is highly mechnized, utilizing techniques as advanced as precision farming, which incorporates computers and satellite imaging to maximize crop yields.

Angie and Eric weren’t junk food fiends before, but the shift in their diet has given them insight to their eating habits, which Angie says were previously driven mostly by convenience.

“We both like to cook, so we ate pretty decently—dinners usually had some sort of meat with a starch and a veggie—but I didn’t realize until recently how much processed food we still ate. Snacks were almost always something out of a box or bag. Our two-year-old often refused to eat anything other than chicken nuggets, cheese crackers, pizza, French fries and cookies.”

Parenthood was a turning point for the Halstens' dietary decisions.

“It’s one thing to make poor choices for yourself,” she says. “It’s a whole different ballgame when you are making them for someone else. We are setting the standards to which he will live the rest of his life.”

She and Eric want Lucas “to start life with healthy habits, instead of struggling to form them as an overweight adult.”

By nixing the perpetual availability of produce that grocery stores afford, Angie says she’s expanding her cooking skills and confidence in the kitchen. She’s already discovered Lucas will eat vegetables she had assumed he wouldn’t, like eggplant.

“I used to just decide what I wanted to cook, make a list and buy what I needed. That seems logical enough. But it doesn’t work that way when you are shopping only at the farmers market. If the tomatoes aren’t ready, they aren’t ready and it doesn’t matter that you really wanted to make ratatouille that week. You have to have a Plan B… and sometimes a Plan C.”

Angie and Eric started a tiny garden at home to offset costs—one tomato plant, one cucumber plant, basil and cilantro—and they've also adjusted how they portion out meat.

“Instead of grilling two big steaks, and making a box of pasta and a can of green beans, I might cut up one steak and make kebabs with lots of different seasonal veggies, and spread a little farmers market goat cheese on a grilled slice of homemade bread," Angie says.

As of Mother’s Day, she owns a pressure canner, which she’s used to can blueberry syrup, peaches, and homemade chicken soup. She hopes preserves willl help them stick with their pledge in the winter months when not much is available at the farmer's market.

Angie has always valued supporting her local economy because “it just seemed more personal” than supporting chain stores, but supporting local agriculture has greater implications since she watched the film Food, Inc.

“The more you know about what’s in your food and where it comes from, the more passionate you will be about sticking to your goals,” she says.

The documentary, produced by TakePart’s parent company Participant Media, highlights the rampant use of pesticides, growth hormones, battery cages, and genetically modified seeds by major agricultural corporations. Angie credits it as one of her greatest resources “in coming to understand the significance of supporting local food.”

“I don’t want to eat or spend money on food grown or created in conditions that aren’t consistent with my personal values,” she explains. “You don’t have to be the one planting the genetically modified seeds to be a part of the problem with our food industry. You perpetuate the problems just by ignoring them. I refuse to be that person.”

Shopping at farmers markets gives her peace of mind about her impact on the food industry. She knows when she eats beef from one of her favorite farms, which is within 15 miles of her house, “that the cows aren’t given growth hormones, that they graze in a large pasture, and that they are slaughtered one at a time as needed.”

When the idea for the pledge was first conceived, the year-long commitment was rather arbitrary; it just seemed like a nice, round number.

“Now I feel sort of silly putting a time limit on a lifestyle change," Angie says. "I am hoping all three of us are gaining lifelong habits. Of course after the official year is over I won’t be enforcing ‘the rules’ on myself, but I’m hoping that I won’t need to because they will just be second nature.”

As the Halstens continue to adjust to their new eating habits, they take critics with a grain of salt.

“Laugh it off when people give you a hard time,” she advises anyone looking to follow in their footsteps. “They either haven’t figured out what they are eating yet, or they have and you make them feel guilty about their own choices.

And if you slip up on occasion? “Don’t quit or feel bad….It’s a process and it’s going to happen in phases. Little changes are better than no changes at all.”