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The Lazy Person's Guide to Eating Local

The person working in this picture is not me!The person working in this picture is not me!

I always find it amusing when people ask how I have time to eat local food. “It must be so hard,” they say, or “One day I’ll have the time, and I’ll eat local food too.” Sure, it takes some time to cook. Nothing beats a Big Mac for speed, and if you‘re filling up on those, you might as well cram as much as you can into the short life you’re likely to live. But, generally, local food doesn’t take any longer to cook than non-local food. In fact, part of what continues to excite me about eating local food is how easy it is. I get most of my food delivered. I never have to think about what’s coming. And I can pull snow pea pods right off the vine in my yard. Here are a few ways you can start eating locally without working too hard. Grow a garden! And by grow a garden, I mean hire someone to grow a garden for you. I have become a huge fan of the fine folks at A Backyard Farm, who not only built my raised-bed garden, planted the veggies, and installed an irrigation system in my yard to ensure that my foods get enough water - they also return each week to check on the plants, pick the ripe veggies, and teach our family how to do it ourselves (as if!) for $35 a week.

You can read the rest of this post - with more fantastic lazy-person ideas - at Live Green Twin Cities. And did I forget to mention how easy it can be to find local, seasonal food at your favorite coop? Jeanne Lakso from Linden Hills Coop set me straight!