How to Eat Organic or Better and Local Without Being Exhausted?

Michelle Gillian wrote:
We all do what we can in the ways it makes sense for us.

You betcha. We can only ever do our best.

Community of course is not primarily about food. (If forced to make a choice I’d trade away local, regenerative-based food for loving family/friends/neighbors in a heartbeat.) Most of us, fortunately, can have both community and better-quality food at some level. In this age of easy travel and easier communication with strangers, tapping into higher quality shipped food is pretty easy. And as John Suavecito said in multiple posts above (wonderful!), there are many, many ways to add bits of goodness into one’s personal food chain. To that I’ll just note that building community is as easy as becoming helpful… you know, what goes around comes around.

Reflecting on what David Milano mentioned, I have shared many plants that just keep coming back every year with neighbors.  Some are perennial, some reseed.  Then they have a continuing supply of healthy, fresh, highly nutritious, no effort food/medicine.  They often want to reciprocate and share something with you.  That's how community blossoms!

John S
PDX OR

It's interesting to hear the different perspectives as people's lives change. I was a fisher/homesteader for many years, and subsistence foraging/hunting/gardening/fishing/canning was a big part of my life. Raising a family in a cabin with only boat or float-plane access, providing, preserving, and preparing food was a major focus of my time.
Now I'm a small-business owner in my 70's, with disabled family members, a very small income, and long drives to get to resources, stores, or activities.  

Living in the wilderness gave me an appreciation of fresh wild or homegrown food, yes. But also for the amount of time and mental focus involved.  Living with wild creatures all around gave me an appreciation for their pragmatism. And dealing with life-threatening disabilities gave me a different set of priorities.
Right now, I don't have the privilege of using that much energy--either from my own muscles, from my car's gas tank, or stored in the form of money--to locate food. Nor do I have the time and mental energy to put into locating it, maintaining networks for it, and so on. The concept of "mental work" is useful here. Could I fit in a few more subsistence activities into my schedule? Yes. Do I have the bandwidth to plan them? No--I'd rather have lunch with a friend, read a book, take a swim, or sit by the fire and recharge than plan one more "have-to" activity.
Mental and emotional sustainability should be our goal as well as physical sustainability.

Many of the respondents here are making subsistence activities--either growing their food or sourcing it--a satisfying part of their social and emotional life. That's ideal, but not attainable for all, just like any other form of excellence. If it's feeling like drudgery, then it would be better to ease up, make a few changes now rather than getting so burnt-out that your abandon the project entirely. Hearing how people are living the dream is great for inspiration, but in my experience, it's overwhelming for those who are drowning in detail already.

I have a couple of suggestions in that direction, and I hope other folks will have more ways to cut back, let go, and streamline life until energy and inspiration return.
1) Find a few things you like and can get/grow easily and concentrate on them. Carol Deppe's book The Resilient Gardener is helpful. She talks about how to find those few staples that make abundance easy rather than trying to grow or source everything in the store. She also gives a lot of attention to strategies for coping with setbacks and limits--financial, physical, medical, and so on. Most subsistence cultures and historical communities based their diet on a couple of staples, like beans and corn, bread and meat, potatoes and cheese, or fish and rice, and then used small amounts of many different seasonal embellishments like wild greens and fruits as they were easily available.
2) Cook large batches; eat leftovers
3) Just as I get wood chips and fallen leaves from the less-sustainable yards of my neighbors, and just as people use readily-available fossil fuels to build earthworks for future abundance, you can use the commodity food system as a source of cheap food energy when needed. Get a big bag of beans, a bag of flour or rice, some discount canned goods, or whatever gives you the cushion you need for food security you don't need to think about. And do have some indulgences stashed as well, for those nights when you need a lift.
4) Recognize that there's no perfect, only better. One week, better might be all local food. Another week, though, better might be more social connections, more artistic endeavors, or more sleep. It's not a contest, and food is not the only arena.
5) If you're going to add anything at all, maybe something in the mindfulness/creative/ gratitude/recreational line might round out your routine better than another task. Or maybe just a good laugh.

To me eating local organic etc. food is not only about 'me'. Yes, my opinion is that this food is best for my health. And it's good for me too to ride my bicycle weekly  (for about half an hour, and the same back again) to an organic farm that sells their products (and of some other organic farms in the region too). And to try to grow some vegetables, fruits and herbs in my own garden too.

But I do it all because I want to be part of the change. If I want to see more organic farms around me, to be it considered 'normal' to eat or to grow organic food, then I need to support it! Now there are plans to start a kind-of CSA in another village not far from here (the kind that's not only supported financially, but also by volunteering at the farm, by the people who get the veggie-boxes), I want to support that too. So then I will ride my bicycle twice a week, to two different villages in the region, to visit two different organic farms. The first one because they have meat and dairy too, and the second one because it's 'community owned'.

Yes, like it was said in the start of this thread, now a large part of my life evolves around food (and clothes, because I like them to be as natural, organic and local as possible too). But isn't that the way it has always been, until industrialisation started? Anyway, to me this is the kind of life I like to have, and to support in my surroundings/community. And there's still plenty of time for the other things that are important to me.

I read a comment about getting older, and not being able to do all this anymore. But I think by supporting the local organic farms now I can still ride my bicycle to them, I 'pave the way' for more organic farms to start closer by. Maybe they'll even have a stand at the weekly market in town (or the 'good food' shop in town will start selling more local products ...). And of course a CSA-community will help the elderly by delivering their veggie-boxes at their home!
But now I do my best to stay as healthy as possible by doing what I can (my age is 69 now btw).

Now I read some more in this thread, I see some of you say it takes so long to cook 'from scratch'. What do you consider 'long'?
Cleaning and cutting vegetables (and meat at the days I eat it) for all of my life has been part of 'cooking a meal' (as I said before: I'm 69 now). For preparing dinner I need 30 - 45 minutes. I don't think that is 'long'. Oh, don't forget I do have to count the time for washing up too (no dishwasher here). I think that's about 15 minutes. Still I spend less than an hour in the kitchen for dinner. Breakfast and lunch take much less time.

When my husband was still alive, he was the 'chef' and I was his 'assistant' in the kitchen. This was a very nice way to spend time together. Now I do it all on my own I still have the good memories of that time!

I think a lot of people did not grow up learning how to cook, and then learned to use cookbooks. Then they get excited about permaculture and start a garden or join a csa, only to become overwhelmed and then burned out.
To me, the foundation is learning to improvise in the kitchen. We have lots of cookbooks, which I rarely use. Most nights I have about 30 min to cook dinner.
If it has been a rough day, my fall backs will be pasta with frozen peas, olive oil, and cheese. Mostly available at a reasonable price organic from the store.
Next level up: Pasta with a cream sauce made with butter, milk, flour, and whatever veg is in the fridge.
Next up? A stir fry with tofu or tempeh and veggies, served over rice.
A stew of veg tossed in the instant pot.
Mexican style with quick homemade flour tortillas and instant pot cooked beans and veggies.
None of this needs detailed planning, or recipes. I’ve been known to get home totally dead, and cook instead of ordering takout because it is less work.

Once you have this foundation - cooking from staples without much planning- it becomes easier to add the bits which gets you local. After dinner, during cleanup, I can mix a batch of slow rise bread and shove it in the fridge. It will rise for a day and I will bake it the following evening. Or I will grab a couple of cups of dent corn I bought from the farmer down the road, and simmer it with pickling lime. The next day I will rinse it and toss it in the food processor to make masa. I can fry it up as tortillas with less than 15 min hands on time. Or I will roast a whole winter squash to blend and use in cream sauce or gnocchi.
The key is not to get all of this going at once. Make simple cooking second nature. Then if any part you add gets to be too much, you can always fall back on that.
It is also true that it helps to have community. My sister for Christmas give home canned beans and soups, and home made spice mixes. She knows they will be valued as the should be, and we absolutely do.

Lina Joana wrote: After dinner, during cleanup, I can mix a batch of slow rise bread and shove it in the fridge. It will rise for a day and I will bake it the following evening. Or I will grab a couple of cups of dent corn I bought from the farmer down the road, and simmer it with pickling lime. The next day I will rinse it and toss it in the food processor to make masa.

Not sure if I said this up thread, but one of the problems many people I know have, is "making the decision". Years ago, a friend who had worked in supportive housing took their approach to her home. She had a 2-week schedule for breakfast or lunch, so if it was Tues on week two, it was grilled cheese sandwiches. Her dinner schedule was 6 weeks long for more variety. Her schedule was written up separately as "weekly shopping list". It worked for her. However, if you're trying for organic and local, one would have to create a list based on seasonal availability, and the big downside, would be building in sufficient flexibility to cope with windfalls.

and wrote:

Make simple cooking second nature.

What's that old children's rhyme - Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot 9 days old? Go back far enough and people only had 1 pot and it sat over the fire and any left-overs got tossed in, and yes, they might well be eating it for 9 days.

People must have been hungry enough that boring wasn't their issue?

I had an interesting baptism-by-fire into cooking when I went vegan at 15 and my mom, who was fairly supportive, rightly told me that she wouldn't be cooking all vegan meals, but would make whatever was easy enough to swap. So I learned how to cook then. And when you don't use meat or dairy, and you cant eat most of what's available that's processed, you learn to cook from scratch. So for the last 20 years of my life this is normal.

Then I found gardening.. Okay, that's fun. Time consuming, but fun. Then permaculture.. Nice, all these perennials cut my time needs down even more. And by planting strategically, I can grow in areas of the garden that barely need watering (high water table) even in our drought summers.

I certainly don't grow everything we eat but consider myself an opportunist. If there is some free time, I'll work on something - weeding, seed organizing, planting, pruning, etc.. Similarly if a friend's farm is overrun with cucumbers, I'll buy the surplus and make lacto pickles. I don't see it as an all or nothing thing, but something that I try to priorize when the opportunity arises.

I've had friends say that they would love to do what I do if only they had the time (backhanded compliment maybe). I have structured my life to allow for it because it's important to me.

Jay Angler wrote:
Not sure if I said this up thread, but one of the problems many people I know have, is "making the decision". Years ago, a friend who had worked in supportive housing took their approach to her home. She had a 2-week schedule for breakfast or lunch, so if it was Tues on week two, it was grilled cheese sandwiches. Her dinner schedule was 6 weeks long for more variety. Her schedule was written up separately as "weekly shopping list". It worked for her. However, if you're trying for organic and local, one would have to create a list based on seasonal availability, and the big downside, would be building in sufficient flexibility to cope with windfalls

Yeah, that definitely doesn’t work for me! The amount of time planning, the detailed shopping lists, and most of all the need to use the specific ingredients no matter if I am tired or running late makes it more stressful rather than less.
I often do have a general plan in my head for the type of dish, which easily keeps things varied. Say I do tacos on Tuesdays. As long as I have the tortillas (or can make them), I can do bean, veggie, tofu, or cauliflower, with a variety of sauces and salsas. And maybe Wednesday is stirfry day. We can do broccoli with tempeh, mixed frozen veggies with egg, or tofu with carrots and kale. We can do peanut sauce or brown sauce, or just soy sauce and sesame. Or we can do spinach and chickpea, with a turkish seasoning blend. Or potatoes and cabbage with cumin and mustard and an Indian spice blend… what’s in the fridge?
Basically, if you have a well stocked spice shelf and a good supply of staples, you can use whatever is fresh in the fridge without thought or getting into a rut.
I get the decision paralysis thing. When I really can’t think of anything, we typically have pasta. No shame in that when it happens.
It also helps to have some tools. The ones I would consider musts are the instant pot and the food processor with shredder and mandolin attachment. Maybe also my toaster/air fryer, since it heats so much faster than the oven.
I think the key is to have staples on hand (flour, rice, noodles, your favorite beans, potatoes, onions, and garlic butter/oil, and spices) and a few basic cooking techniques (sautéing onions, making a cream sauce, preparing common cuts of meat) and then trying simple recipe free meals with whatever fresh food looks good at the store.
I once put wrote a “throw it together” recipe book for a friend. It had things line “stew: sauté whatever sized onions with a couple cloves of garlic in a splash of olive oil. Chop whatever veggies you have and add them along with a few handfuls of red lentils…”
You get the idea. It takes practice, but it doesn’t have to be hard or boring.

I was a single parent.  The kids were with me all week, every week, gone a few (terribly lonely) weeks out of the year.

When the younger one was about 9 or 10 I decided that they could begin to cook dinner.  Each one made dinner twice a week, and I three.  Mostly from scratch, though I did keep a few jars of pasta sauce in the cupboard, and we often had leftovers in the frige.  The younger one made pasta twice a week until the older one pointed out that she would like to have the option of making an easy meal once in a while.

I made up a recipe that he could make.

Broccoli potato frittata.  And I taught him how to time and coordinate the process so that he could be done in half an hour.

Cut the potatoes and put them in half an inch of water in covered sauce pan, put onto the stove to steam.  Cut up the onion and get it into olive oil to sauté.  Cut the broccoli, put it on top of the potatoes to steam.  Grate the cheese.  Break and scramble the eggs. Crush a garlic clove into the sautéed onions, give it a stir.  Drain and add the potatoes and broccoli to the onions and garlic, give it a stir.  Pour on the eggs, adjust the flame.  Maybe stir the mixture a bit to encourage liquid eggs to move to the bottom. Check does it need more oil.  Sprinkle with cheese. Give a warning call “dinner almost ready”.   Grind black pepper over the top.  Cover the pan.  Set the table.  When the cheese is melted and the eggs are done … We’re ready!

It’s a famous recipe in our family.  Perfect for showing how things go together for teaching to start the things that take the longest first.  You don’t need to boil a full pot of water for an inch of cubed potatoes, steam cooks things.
Adaptable to almost anything.  Sub left over rice or pasta, quinoa or sweet potatoes for the potatoes, sub anything for the broccoli: spinach, mushrooms, leftovers, beans.  Throw in a few cranberries or raisins or chopped apples.  Add curry powder or Mexican spices.

Learning to cook is a process.  It’s worthy of our time and attention.  

In the morning, decide what you will be making for dinner.  Just a backbone of a plan.  Do what’s needed “ now” to make life easier for your tired evening self:  For example, get the meat out of the freezer or throw everything in the crockpot if it’s going to be an exhausting day.  Come home to dinner waiting for you... like you had a butler or personal chef.  

Someone already mentioned slow rise no knead dutch oven bread.  Mix it together before you go to bed (5 minutes) or in the morning.  Homemade bread with dinner, or for dinner with hummus and veges or cheese and an apple.

Left overs are wonderful.  If I make too much and get tired of it, and I have added chutney or salsa until I am done with that too, I freeze it in serving sizes.

Soups are great.  Keep the same soup going for a week by adding broth and new ingredients each evening, and bringing it to the boil for 20 minutes while you do kitchen clean up.  Leave it in the pot overnight.  If you boil it 20 to 30 minutes with the lid on, and do not take the lid off it will keep right there on the stovetop.

If I am cooking fish, I cook 3 servings.  I eat one freshly cooked, with side dishes, next meal I have a sandwich, next meal salad.

And, you know what?  You don’t have to start tomorrow and do it perfect and forever.  Read the thread again.  Jot down some ideas that seem doable.  Do what you can.  Try a few new things.  See how it works, try a few more things.

Collect skills and know-how in the kitchen like you collect anything else.  
Build your repertoire.

What’s that saying?  Perfection is the enemy of good.

When I cook something that isn’t that good, it is probably because I was more focused on cleaning the frige and using up small portions…

In that case, it is a good idea, or maybe self defense, to have various pickles, chutneys, sauces and salsas to add flavor to the less than delectable.

Maybe this will help

Exhaustion is the issue for me!  I grow most of my own vegetables;  over the past 20 years I've been gradually building up my soil and abilities to be able to do this.  For me, it takes a lot of work.  My family eats low carb so we don't have those grain/starch staples to fall back on;  it's meat/fish/dairy/etc, a few fruits (including imported ones like olives and coconut), and lots of vegetables.  Being without acreage, I can't produce much from the animal foods category--these I mainly buy from a local butcher (local is the best I can do) and collect an egg or two from my own small flock;  however I am almost completely self-sufficient in year round veg.  

Raising it is really cheap compared to buying it;  and nutritious, tasty, local (obviously), better than organic, etc.  Definitely.  But it's so time-intensive!  Starting seeds, transplanting (intense slug pressure makes direct sowing impossible), general maintenance and so on;  I can grow year round so I'm doing this for about nine months of the year;  some months are busier than others in this respect of course.  

And then harvest, preserving/storage, cooking.  This is often even more time consuming than the starting phase.  Even just washing some veg is a Herculean effort!  Yesterday I soaked some some leeks and black Spanish radishes plus greens through three changes of water:  lots of mud in the first change, a bit less in the second plus a slug, and in the last: still a bit more mud and a compost worm, still wriggling!  Then chopped into a slow cooker stew with a variety of garden veg I'd frozen last autumn.  This time of year there's less harvesting/washing compared to summer and autumn of course;  I can expect to spend about an hour a day for those couple of months:  harvesting, washing and preparing, dehydrating, freezing, pickling...

I don't have an answer to how to be less exhausted!  Except as has been mentioned already:

Many hands make light work

Change my mindset/whistle while I work/make it fun

Order my priorities:  is obsessing over producing all my vegetables affecting my sanity?!

Accept there are just some things out of my control

To ease your work on leeks, I have a strategy. I bought 100 leek starts for $1,  25 years ago. I planted them. When the tops grew enough to harvest, I chopped the greens above the soil line. I chop them up small and put them in my side dishes. They are a flavoring herb and a vegetable in one.  That mostly happens from January to July here.  Because I only chop the above ground portion, I don't have to clean them. I eat them raw, because they are more powerful medicine that way. Then I also don't use as much as I would if I cooked them.   Because I only chop the top, they keep coming back and I never have to plant them.  Leeks have substantial greens, much bigger than onion, garlic, or chives, especially as the spring comes on.  They get a little  more numerous every year, so I disperse them throughout the yard, as an annoyance to insect pests.  They have gigantic tall flowers in the summer, which are pretty, and an attractant and food to pollinators.  Alliums like these are one of the top anti-cancer foods.

Another top anti cancer food is cruciferous vegetables, like cabbage and broccoli. My favorite one to grow is horseradish.  Like the leeks, I mostly just harvest the greens. They are very mild flavored compared to the root. They have huge leaves and they taste good.  I also bought it once, 25 years ago, and just cut the leaves.  The plant continues to grow underground from the root. I don't have to clean them much, because it's the above ground part that I eat.  The rib in the middle of the leaf is tough, so sometimes I chop it into tiny little bits, and sometimes I compost it.  

The season for leeks and the season for horseradish are perfect complements.  The leek leaves come up in the beginning of winter and last until the middle of summer.  The horseradish leaves come up in the beginning of summer and last until the beginning of winter.  Great food. Almost no work. Fight cancer. Save money. Happy belly.

John S
PDX OR

I read some more posts here. Several mention 'knowing how to cook (a simple meal)'. Yes, that's a priority. I am so glad my mother taught me the basic principles of cooking when I was a child (probably from age about 10 years).

When you know those basic principles, you can make a good meal with any available products-of-the-season, because you do not need a recipe. You can be creative and combine different 'cuisines'. F.e. I don't want to use rice (it's always imported and my guts do not like it), so I experiment with grains that are more locally grown (and organic) instead.