Carolina Food Only Wrap-Up and More

Whoops! I guess the daily posting last week was too much for my delicate little constitution to handle and I had to take an entire week off to recover.

The last day of the Eat Carolina Local Food Challenge consisted of leftovers and beer and thus wasn't much to write about. I made it almost the entire way, but with only two hours to go in the seven-day challenge I ran out of local beer at band practice and drank one of the drummer's Coronas.

We had local steaks the day after the challenge ended, and last night I went to a wine dinner that featured a good bit of South Carolina food. So I've kept it up in some ways. I'm back on the imported olive oil, though, and non-local half-and-half in my coffee.

"It just kind of reeks of asceticism," Lawson said halfway through the week. He'd admitted he had no idea why I was doing this and thought it was silly to deprive myself of non-local things just because they weren't local. "Can't you just make a note when you can't find something around here, but then go ahead and eat it? Like, okay, there's no local olive oil: duly noted. Now have some imported olive oil."

But it was about more than the deprivation. We tried a number of things, like the Eubanks Farm New York strip steaks and the local goat cheese, that I wouldn't have sought out otherwise. I ate tons of amazing fruit. And it was instructive to see what we would be eating if a) gas prices got so high that the price of food from outside the region became prohibitive (not likely, I know), or b) we lived here before the era of mass transit, or c) we farmed and ate only our own products.

Anyway, I'm off to drink a Bass and make some homemade nachos. The cheese, at least, will be local, and the tomatoes and chiles. And the peaches for dessert.