Slim Down by Eating Local

This Week at Our George Mason University, Prince William Campus Market
Thursday 11:30am–2:30pm
Parking lot of the Freedom Center
Map

Thanks for turning out last week in larger numbers.  We are working to bring in more vendors for you, and it will depend on the traffic we can promise them. Uncle Fred's BBQ may not be with us this week -- we'll update you if we can on the University Life Facebook page. But you must try the sausage sandwiches this week and the crepes -- they are popular and really good.

Available at the market this week:

• Crepes and more crepes -- sweet and savory for your dining versatility
• Empanadas and Argentine sausages
• Comfort Snack Mixes and baked goods
• Tony Fetters Fruit Farm, our new produce vendor with apple cider, apple cider donuts and whoopie pies (see their Facebook page)

From the Market Master

I thought this week that I would share a personal lesson about the benefits of buying fresh and local. Over this past summer, I have made a conscious effort to make every meal we eat at home a largely local meal and have been planning meals with that goal in mind, but also with a determination to keep within the food budget that has evolved over the years.

As you know if you read my rants and raves, I have never tried to convince anyone that buying local is cheaper. If you hope to keep eating as much local meat as you have probably been eating when you were buying heavily subsidized and unnaturally corrupted corporate meat products, it will cost you more. My strategy was to deliberately reduce the amount of meat we were eating each week. The average American eats nine ounces of meat per day, working out to nearly four pounds per week. And I was hoping to reduce that to more like two pounds per week each for my husband and me. But that figure was based on our wanting to eat more locally produced meat while staying within that budget.

It was easy during the summer to do that, and while we did eat wild salmon and Atlantic shrimp during that time, almost all of our meat consumption this past summer was local. I highlighted eggs in at least one meal a week, and sometimes for as many as three meals a week, we ate only vegetables. At least once a week, we ate Cavanna's Pasta -- almost always with just vegetables, not a meat sauce. Except when we luxuriated in a really great grilled steak, there were always more veggies on the plate than meat.

The surprise revealed itself this week when we had to pull out our fall and winter clothes -- my jeans and jackets and for my husband a sport coat he had not needed in many months. And lo and behold! My jeans are much roomier than they were last spring when I put them away, and my husband's fairly new jacket was also hanging loose from the shoulders. We have both lost several pounds without a serious effort to do so.

Maybe the diet gurus are correct -- it can be counter-productive to focus on losing weight, which makes the whole process a negative experience. But a focus on eating healthier can be a much more positive adventure. Buying fresh and eating local certainly involves less angst and agony. And in my family, we didn't even know we were losing weight -- we were having too much fun eating well.

See you at the market!

Jean