Alicia indulging in red wine and chocolate cake before her month of Cape Breton-only food begins.

Last September, Alicia Lake ate only Cape Breton-grown food for one month. She wrote about it on her blog, and raised a lot of folks’ consciousness about just what is available here. (Coffee is definitely not, and she missed that terribly.)

This year, she’s doing it again, and again writing about it on her blog, “Cape Breton Local Food Adventure”. Every day she checks in with what she ate that day, where it came from, and roughly how much her meal cost. (It’s usually a lot less than you would think – a couple of dollars!)

It makes for tasty reading, and what I note as I read it is just how much there is available right here on the island – a bounty of vegetables and fruits, and meats. And for the foods you can’t get on the island, she tackles some of those, too: Alicia and her husband made their own salt by collecting ocean water and boiling it down (read about it here), and their own ketchup from chicken fat, tomatoes, hot peppers, and garlic powder made by a local farm.

As I read it, I’m impressed by Alicia’s “get ‘er done” attitude and aplomb, and I feel like, “Why can’t I eat as local as this?!” (Answer: I get lazy. That’s the long and short of it, and no, I’m not proud of it.)

Do you eat local? How much of your diet is local, would you say? Is it hard to do, or easy? What are the stumbling blocks? I’d love to hear from everyone on this topic.

And don’t forget that I’ve got a page on this very blog of eating local resources – links to farmer’s markets, farms, and the blogs of some producers. If there is something missing, do let me know!

Cattails that they picked earlier in the year to try and make flour from. (Post yet to come!)

The sea salt they made.

Some food is free for the picking!