I’m preparing for my planned week of local eating by obtaining some local food products — specifically, peanut butter from The Peanut Shop of Williamsburg (not so important), and staple grain items from Wade’s Mill (very important). For the grains, I bought whole and white bread flours, white all purpose flour, semolina flour and yellow cornmeal, all for very reasonable prices. I took a picture, but I’ll have to wait until I’m home to upload it.
I’ve only opened the bread flours from Wade’s Mill, but they’re amazing. They smell great, and the bran and germ are present in big pieces in the whole wheat flour, similar to the way graham flour is processed. I don’t know if this is intentional or due to the stone milling process, but either way it adds some nice texture. The white flour retains the germ, which is unusual. I made some Locavore Dinner Rolls last night using a mixture of the whole and white bread flours, sweetened with tasty locust honey from Vox Pop! Apiary in Frederick, MD. I used butter from Shoppers which I erroneously believed to be produced locally — I’ve since found out that it’s made in Madison, Wisconsin. Oh well. The rolls went straight into the freezer, which always makes me a little sad but is truly the best way to keep them fresh for more than a couple of days.
Anyway, the rolls are delicious (one of them somehow failed to make it into the freezer). The bread flour turned out to be very strong and rose as well as King Arthur Flour, which is the best-rising brand I’ve used. So if you’re in the area, shipping isn’t too bad — certainly cheaper than making the drive down to the mill — and the flour’s well worth it.
Also, on the subject of butter, I’ve found out that Giant Food’s store brand dairy products, including milk, butter and nonfat dry milk, are produced by the same company that makes Marva Maid brand dairy products in Virginia. It’s actually a small co-op of family dairy farms in Virginia, with a processing plant for butter and dry milk in Laurel, MD. This is apparently true for all of Giant’s locations on the East Coast, and I certainly wouldn’t have guessed. This means it’s dead easy for me to get my hands on a variety of dairy products that are very much locally produced. I expected dry milk in particular to be very hard to come by, so it’s a very pleasant surprise.
I wish I had a clever closing sentence, but I don’t.
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Hey, if local is the criteria, you’re in luck. For example, Dreyer’s 705,000 sq ft ice cream plant is in Laurel, one of the largest in the world. You can eat all the Dreyer’s, Edy’s or Haagen-Dazs you want guilt-free. In fact, food is Maryland’s largest manufactured product, followed closely by chemicals. Heck, maybe we ought to just lump the two together since they’re so closely related. And forget about all those pansy-assed Amish farmers across the line in Lancaster County. The REAL food comes from next door, York County – Snyder’s pretzels, all the goodness of Utz, Hershey’s for God’s sake. If you want to get closer to the farm, there are many dairies too. But not those silly sit on a three-corner stool while fondling a cow sort of things. How about this one: “Hope Acres Robotic Milking Dairy Farm” ROBOTIC! YES!!! Eat local AND eat high tech. This truly is the Land of Pleasant Living.
Well, I do think it’s a heck of a lot easier to eat local here than in, say, the grain belt — even if agriculture is much more prominent in those areas. There’s just a great diversity of stuff being grown and processed here.
I’d be all over Snyder’s and Utz, if Snyder’s wasn’t importing flour from the Dakotas and Utz wasn’t importing potatoes from Idaho. Same sort of thing with Dreyer’s — they’re trucking stuff in from all over the place, but not buying from local dairy farmers.
I’ve got no objection to the high tech stuff (robotic dairies sound cool), but huge processing plants, even if they’re located nearby, are still contributing to the Great Screwing Over of American agriculture.
Oh. Locally GROWN. Never mind.
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