Locavore on the road, or why we're blessed to live in Carrollton

Several months back we planned this week to be the Davis family vacation.  So this past Saturday we packed up our stuff and headed to Gulfport, Mississippi.  We planned to do our best with the Locavore Challenge on the trip, but since we would be sharing our food decisions with family members, we couldn't be certain how it would be go.

Before leaving I did a little bit of research on the web and discovered that Gulfport has a Farmers' Market that is on Tuesdays.  So we bought some butter and cheese at Farmers Fresh, picked some produce from the garden, and headed down the road.

One note on the road.  Thus far, to my experience, every McDonald's, Wal-Mart and Cracker Barrel I have been in has a baby changing table.  As a result, we end up stopping at these (mostly McDonald's since they are ever present and often close to the interstate).  If anybody out there is an app developer and wants to make a changing table locator app, I would be all for it.  In any case, the first epic fail of our locavore holiday came at a McDonald's when we got some fries as a snack, and Raine got his first taste of McDonald's.  C'est la vie.  After all, we aren't fundamentalists.

Once in Mississippi we had a few days till the next Farmers' Market, so I bought some provisions at the local Winn-Dixie, after struggling to find anywhere else to go.  Later that day I found out that probably less than a mile from the Winn-Dixie was a store called Rouse's with this in the window:

We saw this and were excited.  Upon entering the store, however, it seemed largely to be a conventional grocery store.  Still, it was cool to see that somewhere else was doing a similar challenge (though theirs was in June so it was over already).  We did get some local oysters (local seafood being the big blessing of the gulf coast), as well as some beer that is brewed in Kiln, Mississippi (home of Brett Favre and where Jeff once camped while doing some Katrina relief work).  So still we needed to wait until Tuesday.

On Monday we stopped by where the Gulfport Farmers' Market is supposed to be happening, and there was no sign that it existed.  I asked a local business, and they pointed to a spot and indicated that before Katrina there had been a Farmers' Market there, but not since.  I'm not sure if it is because the facility is not built (possibly rebuilt) or if it is for lack of Farmers or interest, but we were stumped on local food.

We were discouraged, but we decided to look around at least for more local seafood options.  We also were looking around for what else to do.  After checking out Quality Seafood and Poultry (mostly seafood, but we did pick-up a chicken stuffed with crawfish etoufee there) we stopped into the Biloxi visitor's center.  Once inside we discovered that there is a Farmers' Market in Biloxi on Tuesday also.  So it was back on.  Perhaps we could have more local stuff than just seafood.

On Tuesday morning, we got up, had our breakfast, and headed to Biloxi.  Again, we were disappointed.  Given that most tables had bananas, it was clear that local foods were not the emphasis of the market.  We walked away wondering if any of the vendors were in fact Farmers, though one table did advertise homegrown okra.  We did walk away with some sweet potatoes we were told came from Northern Mississippi, but otherwise we were mostly disappointed.

Then yesterday, we needed to stop by the grocery store again and saw this sign:

This was in a different Rouse's but was seriously cool.  For a chain grocery store, they do seem to be showing flexibility needed to purchase from local farms, and they identify them in the store by name.  We thought that was cool and picked up more sweet potatoes to keep Raine well fed.

On the whole this has been an interesting learning experience about our community at home.  Being on the road has really made me appreciate the opportunities we have in Carrollton: a vibrant Farmers' Market that is full of fresh food every Saturday this time of year; local stores where we can get tasty foods from local farmers; and restaurants that have been featuring locavore specials.  It has also helped me see how much easier it is to eat local in the community where you live and know people.  I suspect with enough time we could be more connected and eat much more locally here, but years in Carrollton have made connections with the people who grow our food (and allowed us to grow a lot of our own) seem effortless.  Whereas only being here a few days, we might have had to spend most of our time searching out connections for local foods.  There's some quote that someone once said about how much we learn about home by going somewhere else, and it seems like that is definitely true for us.