Eating local for the winter

VERMONT – Thankfully Bill McKibben doesn’t depend on coffee or tea to begin his day.

If he did, the environmental writer and Middlebury College scholar-in-residence might have had a more challenging time surviving for seven months almost entirely on foods grown within a few dozen miles of his Ripton home.
And those were not the easy summer and early fall months, during which one would be hard-pressed to avoid local bounty. McKibben managed to eat locally through the dead of last winter and early spring when Vermonters traditionally relied on root cellars, smoked and dried meat, salted fish, and a pantry full of home-canned vegetables and fruits.

That was, of course, before the days of global, single-season supermarkets. “In our world, it’s always summer somewhere,” he wrote in an article for Gourmet magazine’s July issue about his experience.

Burlington Free Press