The Local Year

A few months ago, I had what was either a very good idea or a completely unhinged one:

What if our family went an entire year without buying food from a grocery store?

Not “eat out of our pantry for a month.” Not “shop local when it’s convenient.”

A full year.

No grocery stores.

I broached the idea with my husband, and when he didn’t immediately grab his chips and head for the hills, I began to look into it more seriously.

A bit of a plan was born. We’re going to try to feed our family through what we can grow and raise ourselves, local farms, farmers markets, ranchers, small producers, bartering, preserving, and probably a fair amount of figuring-it-out-as-we-go.

And thus, The Local Year was created.

There wasn’t one dramatic moment where I swore off grocery stores forever.

It was more like a hundred little things piling up.

Food recalls. Ingredient labels that require a chemistry degree. Produce traveling thousands of miles before it gets to us. Realizing how disconnected I was from where most of our food actually came from.

And at the same time, I was getting more interested in doing things the other way.

Growing a garden. Buying meat directly from a farmer. Canning tomatoes. Milling our own flour. Learning how to preserve what’s in season instead of expecting strawberries to magically exist in January.

The more we started doing it, the more I wondered:

How much of our food could we realistically source outside of the conventional grocery system?

Not as homesteaders living completely off-grid.

As a normal family.

I work full time. We have two kids with activities and places to be. We don't have endless hours to churn butter while wearing a linen apron in a field.

I want to know if this can work in real life.

Can we build relationships with the people producing our food?

Can we eat seasonally without feeling deprived?

Can I preserve enough during the summer to make February a little less depressing?

Can we waste less?

Can we become more capable and a little less dependent on a system where most of us have absolutely no idea how our dinner got to our plate?

And - probably most importantly - can we do all of that without making our lives completely miserable? Without our children rebelling?

That’s the experiment.

I don't want this to become one of those challenges where I'm explaining why a tablespoon of mustard technically violated Article III, Section 2 of The Local Year bylaws.

So the rules are intentionally pretty simple.

1. No grocery stores for one year.

That’s the big one.

We're not buying our regular food from traditional grocery stores for the year.

2. We can eat what we already have.

I am not throwing away perfectly good food in our pantry, freezer, or basement just to make the challenge harder.

That would defeat half the point.

Part of this year is actually going to be about becoming better at using and preserving food instead of constantly buying more.

3. Local is the goal - not perfection.

We're going to prioritize food grown or produced as close to home as reasonably possible.

Our own garden and property first.

Then local farmers, ranchers, orchards, producers and markets.

We'll barter and trade when we can.

And when something can't realistically be produced here, we'll figure out the most reasonable alternative.

I'm not pretending coffee beans are suddenly going to start growing in Eastern Washington.

4. Preserving counts. A LOT.

Canning, freezing, freeze drying, fermenting, dehydrating - all fair game.

Honestly, this is probably the only reason this experiment has a chance of working.

The goal isn't to eat exclusively fresh food 365 days a year. It's to relearn something people did for generations: eat what's available and save the abundance for later.

5. This is not a purity contest.

There will probably be exceptions.

There will definitely be mistakes.

I will almost certainly discover three months into this that I forgot to make a rule for some bizarrely specific situation.

We'll figure it out when we get there.

I care much more about seeing how far we can take this than being able to say we followed some arbitrary set of rules perfectly.

Maybe after a year I decide grocery stores are the greatest invention mankind has ever created.

Entirely possible.

But I hope we come out of this knowing our local food system better.

I hope my kids know the people who grow some of their food.

I hope I learn a ridiculous number of skills I didn't have before.

I hope we're eating better food, wasting less of it, and becoming more thoughtful about what we buy.

And I hope that by sharing the entire process - including what works, what absolutely does not, what it costs, where we find food, what I preserve, and what we actually eat - it makes buying locally feel a little more doable for other families too.

You do not need ten acres.

You do not need to quit your job.

And you definitely don't need to stop going to the grocery store for a year.

Maybe you just find a farmer you love.

Maybe you plant tomatoes next summer.

Maybe you buy a quarter cow.

Maybe you learn how to make one thing you normally buy.

That's kind of the point.

I don't think we all need to go backward.

I just think there might be a few things worth bringing back.

So... here we go.

365 days. No grocery stores.

I'll report back from the other side.

-Ashley