Oak Park family keeps its diet local
'LOCAVORES' | Visits to farmers market led them to develop a new lifestyle
Rob Gardner and his wife, Sheila Essig, bought a cow.
Half a cow, to be exact, from farmer Vicki Westerhoff in St. Anne.
The Oak Park couple aren't farmers. Rather, they are "locavores" who, with their two daughters, eat and cook with as much locally grown or produced food as they can.
(Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times)
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"I've never fully appreciated that, when the seasons change, my tastes change," she said.
As members of a Community Supported Agriculture program, or CSA, Gardner, 43, and Essig, 49, get a weekly box of produce from Westerhoff's farm, Genesis Growers.
Last summer, they shopped weekly at the Green City Market and Oak Park farmers market. They stashed copious amounts of market produce in a second freezer, in their basement. Sturdier root vegetables and apples went into a small storage room. The cow, which should arrive in parts in mid-May, also is destined for the freezer.
What's now a lifestyle for Gardner, who does business-background investigations, and Essig, a former public-interest lawyer who's now a stay-at-home mom, grew out of their regular visits to the Oak Park farmers market. They wanted to gradually increase the amount of food they bought directly from farmers, while scaling down trips to chain supermarkets, "partly for the nostalgic sense of seeing what it was like to live back then and partly for the food, because it tastes so much better," Gardner said.
They got serious about two years ago, when Gardner -- author of the food blog vitalin formation.blogspot.com -- heard about an "Eat Local Challenge" organized by the Locavores, an online "community." The Locavore concept, started by four San Francisco Bay Area women, is based around eating food grown within 100 miles of where you live.
Gardner knew their limits in the Chicago area. "I set the boundaries within the Big 10 conference," he said.
They managed pretty well this past winter with all the produce they had put away. Essig also learned to can and preserve.
Looking inside their second freezer this week, this is what Gardner saw: cantaloupe, rhubarb, blueberries, peaches, tomatoes, corn, broccoli, bell peppers and peas -- all from last summer. Oh, and also a surplus of cherries.
While the couple says that even among their friends, they're sometimes seen as "zealots," they make concessions. They still eat citrus fruit and bananas. They eat out, and not just at restaurants that tout local products on their menus. They cook with non-local olive oil and drink non-local coffee. But the coffee they drink is locally roasted at Blue Max Coffee in Forest Park.
Their definition of "local" also means shopping at independent grocer Caputo's, which, to their delight, carries Wisconsin potatoes.
"To a certain extent, it's like a hobby," Gardner said. "We spend more money than we would if we went to the Jewel."
But knowing where their food comes from "makes the food taste that much better," he said.
"The more we do it, the easier it becomes, and the more we want to do it," Essig said.
