foodperson.com

You may think you put dinner on the table, but if you think a little deeper, you’ll realize you had a lot of help putting it there.

It’s easy to forget, amid the snazzy packaging in the supermarket, the usually invisible chain of people who contribute to our meals. Buying local food (from a CSA or farmers market or other local food supplier) makes that chain more visible.

Last night’s meatballs brought that fact home to me. Look who contributed:

(Woo-hoo! First photo from my new camera!)

• The cattle rancher who raised the local beef and the processor who slaughtered and butchered it. (I don’t buy much meat and buy even less due to the cost since my local food consciousness has been raised, so this was something of a special occasion. Actually, when you live in Kansas, most beef is relatively local. According to the USDA, Kansas was number 1 nationwide in cattle slaughtered in 2005, but suffice it to say that relatively little of that beef was grass raised and finished. Here’s more if you’re interested on the Kansas beef industry.)
• The local truck farmer who sold me the onion in the meatballs.
• The CSA farmer who raised the summer squash that I grated and chopped and added to the meatballs. (Side note: used about 3/4 cup, which seemed to work fine and dispatched a bit more squash.)
• The Bauman’s Cedar Valley Farm (no website) from nearby Garnett which provided the pastured chicken egg that held the meatballs together. (They put little strips of paper with farm updates in their cartons. This week’s note tells the story of the family’s hay-making operation, saying, in part, “Marvin estimated that he lifted over 42,500 lbs of hay in one day alone.”)
• The woman who works elsewhere in the building where I have a part-time job and whose garden produced so many roma tomatoes that she was giving them away by the boxful.
• My neighbors who contributed last-minute basil and oregano from their yard.
• Myself, with rosemary and bay leaf from pots on my back porch.

That was just for the meatballs and sauce and not counting the innumerable other people involved in creating the olive oil, salt, pepper and breadcrumbs I also used.

Have you eaten well? If so, go ahead and kiss a farmer or, better yet, thank him or her with your purchases.

Below, the local meatballs while cooking. (The yellow flecks of squash seemed to disappear when the cooking was done.)