Interview with Locavore Leda Meredith

(Leda was previously featured on Taste of Local here):

TL: Spring is here (although it doesn’t  feel like it), and soon farmer’s markets will be teeming with local produce.  That isn’t so during the winter.  Looking back on the winter months, what options do people who want to eat locally have during the colder months?

LM: Actually, winter is not so bad thanks to increased offerings at the farmers’ markets and more CSAs offering winter shares. Some fresh greens (kale, collards, spinach) can be had at least until March, along with root vegetables and winter squash. Queens County Farm Museum had the great idea of freezing pints of their heirloom tomatoes and selling them at the Union Square market for people to make winter soups and sauces with.

When it is really bleakest is mid-March till mid-April. The new spring crops haven’t come in yet, and the farmers are running out of their stored crops such as the root vegetables. Only a few farmers manage to keep offering fresh greens during that time. The storage apples are getting to be mealy and really only good cooked, and no other fruit is available. It’s at that time especially that I turn to my pantry.

TL: How can people who are considering an all local diet prepare now for next winter?

LM: This gets down to that pantry I mentioned. Even if people don’t have skills in canning or pickling, they can still freeze fruits as they come into season. I still have blueberries and plums from last year in the freezer that I am enjoying on yogurt and on pancakes–goes a long way towards fending off late-season apple boredom! If people do take the time to learn a few other food preservation skills, they can vary their winter diet even more.

TL: You currently reside in Brooklyn, New York and yet you manage to maintain an urban garden.  Can you talk a bit about urban gardening?

LM: Urban gardening is an essential piece of the jigsaw puzzle of creating a sustainable food system. For the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population calls an urban dwelling home. At the same time, farmlands are disappearing at an alarming rate while population continues to increase. Our food has to grow somewhere. Where is it going to grow? If everyone in the New York City area, for example, chose to eat a mostly local foods diet, could the farms surrounding the city actually supply that much food? Probably not. But if you start to make use of backyards, community gardens, rooftops, and terraces, which add up to a tremendous amount of space, and pair that with the surrounding rural areas, then yes, the NYC area could provide for itself.

Alice Waters has done wonderful work establishing schoolyard gardens, and I think these are important. They not only provide the kids with healthier food while reducing the carbon footprint of their school lunches, but teach them gardening skills that will be with them for a lifetime.

TL: What suggestions can you give to other city dwellers who don’t have the access to a yard and would like to grow some of their own produce?

LM: The first place I would start is by joining or starting a local community garden. Then I would look at every possible available growing space, including the roof, windowsill, indoors (not everything can be grown indoors, but quite a bit can), front steps for containers, etc.

TL: Can you give some examples of what can grow indoors?

LM: Fruits tend not to do well indoors. And we’re not just talking about sweet fruits: botanically a fruit is any seed bearing part of a plant. So that includes tomatoes, squash, etc.

What does do well are leafy greens especially lettuce, and some herbs. The best herbs for indoor growing are chervil, chives, parsley, rosemary, and mint.

TL: Eating locally has extended to the White House – clearly people have taken notice. How do you think those who are interested in advancing the practice/awareness of eating locally can benefit from this new exposure?  Is there any fear of over exposure?

LM: For now, I think the exposure is great. Michelle Obama tearing up the South Lawn for a Victory Garden was a great attention-getter for the local foods movement. The climate change clock is ticking. The local foods movement is an important part of moving towards a sustainable future, and so it can’t afford to remain a fringe movement. So for now I’d say the exposure is a good thing.

On the downside, there is the chance that “local” will become an almost meaningless value-added label as in some cases “organic” has become. I think it is harder for that to happen with local, though. Either something (and all of its ingredients and any packaging) was created and shipped from less than 500 miles away or it wasn’t.

TL: Imagine an end of the world/disaster type movie (i.e. Armageddon or the Day After Tomorrow) where food systems are compromised and the people of the world must now produce their own food.  Your job is to lead survivors in developing local food system.  How would you proceed?

LM: In that worst case scenario, the first place I would start would be to teach people to identify and cook with the wild edible plants growing around them. There are two reasons why that would be the first course of action: 1. most of those plants are more likely to survive climate change and other disasters than the domesticated plants we have to coddle along with irrigation, fertilizer, etc. So they are likely to be there even in case of disaster. 2. From seed to crop takes months, and people would need something to eat while they were waiting for their new crops to be harvestable.

Next I would teach them some basic gardening skills so that they could start to grow their own crops down the line. I would also find out if there were any gardeners and farmers in the area already in full swing, and start working with them to develop ways to get their surplus (whatever they didn’t need to eat for their own personal survival) to other people. In the case of a real disaster in which people might not have money to exchange for the food (or the currency might be meaningless), I would start a barter system, e.g. I will work so many hours on your farm or in your garden in exchange for so much food, or I have a skill such as carpentry that I can trade for food.

TL: In this scenario you are moving from New York: What will your last local New York City meal look like (if possible include the distances places and distances your food would come from)?

LM: A loaf of homemade bread (flour from Wild Hive Farm, less than 100 miles away)
Fish from Blue Moon’s fisheries, less than 100 miles away
A big salad from my garden (0 miles) with Old Chatham Ewe’s Blue cheese on it (124 miles)
Raspberries from my garden (0 miles) with whipped cream from Ronnybrook (97 miles)

…but then again, I can think of dozens of other last NYC locavore meals that would be just as appealing. Depends on what season and what day you ask me!

TL: What super powers would the comic book character ‘Locavore’ have?

LM: Able to halt the Demons of Climate Change with a single meal; Defender of Farmers; Champion of The Green; Restorer of Health and Community via the secret weapons of Deliciousness and Seasonality.

Leda Meredith is a local foods activist, an instructor at the New York Botanical Garden and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the winner of Adelphi University’s Teaching Excellence Award. She is the author of “Botany, Ballet, and Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes,” which includes the story of the year she ate only food grown and raised within 250 miles of her apartment in Brooklyn, NY. There is more about her local food adventures on her blog, Leda’s Urban Homestead http://ledameredith.net/wordpress