Buying American Day 1

What a heck of a day.

After our most recent grocery trip (a couple days before Shannon and I decided to buy US products only) we still had a few items we weren't able to find at Winco, and I was so excited to get started on this grand adventure that I decided today would be the day we'd go pick up those few missing extras.  By the time we got back (4 1/2 hours later), we were exhausted and happy to not be in grocery stores anymore.  We'd also discovered a few problem areas we're going to have to address.

But let's tell this story in chronological order.

Before we left, I pulled up my grocery list and began to write down the places we were going to get our food.

• Bread (Great Harvest)
• Whole Cumin (Life Source)
• Veggies (Saturday Market)
• Milk (Safeway)
• Edamame (Safeway)
• Sugar (Safeway)
• Butter (Safeway)
• Saltines (Safeway)

I was especially excited by the prospect of Great Harvest bread and veggies from the Saturday Market (which just reopened today!) because I knew precisely where the food from those places was made: right here in the valley!  However, as we drove into town, my first question of the day suddenly occurred to me:

If I buy something that was produced locally that has several different ingredients (like bread), do I have to make sure that the place where I buy also uses ingredients only from the US?

It was a hard question to answer.  I mean, the bread is made in the US - no question! - but do I need to be vigilant about where the ingredients came from?  If I was buying generic bread from Winco, I wouldn't have a second thought about it: if it says "Made in the USA" on the bag, that's good enough for me.  But because Great Harvest has a physical location where I can meet the people who made the bread I'm about to buy face-to-face, shouldn't I exercise more caution?  Or should I instead be researching the bread I want to buy from Other Company to make sure they're using all domestic ingredients?

In the end, I decided that I'd ask at Great Harvest, then decide while I was there what was important.  Decision neatly avoided.  (Existentialism FAIL.)

When we arrived at Life Source for the cumin, though, I found that another question was waiting for me there.  Life Source has a great bulk foods section, with tons of different teas, spices, salts, flours, etc.  (Shannon and I later wondered why we didn't try buying sugar there...but were too exhausted to go back.)  We made a beeline for the spices and found the cumin, only to discovered that because it was a bulk item, there wasn't any specific info about where it came from.

If bulk foods don't tell us where they come from, should we avoid them completely?

In the end, we decided that it was an American distribution company, so that should be close enough.  But upon researching the distributor at home, I found that maybe that wasn't a good idea.  Seems our cumin was distributed by Frontier Natural Products Co-op, a company that carries herbs, spices, teas, and other foods from around the world.  They seem like a company I'd like - though the notably don't mention that they're products are fair trade, which raises a bit of a red flag for me - but sadly they don't get their cumin from the US.  According to their site, their major cumin distributors are in Turkey, India, and China.

Sorry, US.

After Life Source, we headed to Saturday Market, which I was excited for.  I mean, how much more sure can I be that something's grown in the US if it's just grown a few miles from where I live, right?

But when we got there, only a fraction of the whole lot was taken up, and only one stand had veggies: onions, potatoes, a few other things; all things we either already had or didn't need.  We also found a gentleman who sells eggs, but since we just bought eggs a few days ago, there was no reason to buy from him either.  In the end, the only thing we bought was a little honey bear full of blackberry honey from W.C. Kester Apiaries from Rickreall, OR.  (Sorry, no site to link to.)  And it wasn't so much that we needed honey as we needed info.  The gentleman there told us that although there would be at least a smattering of people at the Market every week, we were unlikely to find any fruits or veggies there till mid-May at the earliest.

(On a side note, we also determined that he doesn't require the services of someone who really loves bees but is not a trained beekeeper, but that other beekeepers in the area might.  He provided us with a URL for finding these people.  Wahoo!)

So we decided to instead get veggies at Morrow & Sons Produce on Silverton Rd. (the veggie store across from Mom's veggie store, where they don't charge us to use a debit card, and which also don't have a site to link to), and headed to lunch at Prudence Uncorked, where the great and mystical Scott seems to be tending bar.  It was closed, but it brought another question to mind:

Can we eat at restaurants that don't get their food from domestic sources?

They are, in fact, local business, but along the same vein as Great Harvest, do I need to know that they get their food only from domestic sources?  Luckily for us in the Willamette Valley there's a reasonably good selection restaurants that source locally, but if we ever go out of the Valley, can we eat at local places that buy food from outside the country?  If I'm trying to help the country, is it better to support local business that doesn't support American farmers, or is it better to support American farmers myself by cooking with their produce on my own and to hell with the local businesses that support foreign economies rather than the domestic one?

After the let down at the restaurant we headed to Great Harvest...and there was no parking.  We were still cold after our trip to Saturday Market and didn't want to deal with parking blocks away for a loaf of bread we could buy on Monday, so we passed it up for now.  However, according to their website, the wheat at least comes from Montana, so that's a start.  But where do they get their yeast?  Their salt?  Is the "something sweet" in their five ingredients actually a local honey when you buy from the Salem location?  And the bigger question: should I care?

We headed to Safeway next, and I was dubious about my ability to find what we need there.  I mean, everything so far had been little local stores; Safeway's a national chain.  If anyone, they should be cowing to The Man over in China, right?

Milk first.  Shannon likes the O Organics brand, and luckily it says right on the label: Made in the US.  Sweet!  (Of course, Shannon said I shouldn't be surprised our dairy is domestic.  I guess that's true.  How totally dead would milk be if you had to wait for it to come from Indonesia?)  Next was butter, which was a little more tricky.  There was nothing telling me where it had been made, only distributor information.  I saw that the O Organics butter is distributed by Lucerene, and looking at their butter I saw that it's made in the US, so I decided that this info combined with the "dairy principle" Shannon mentioned was enough reason to believe the butter was made in America, too.  I've since confirmed on the internet that the O Organics butter comes from cream produced by the same cows that make our milk, so we're in the clear.

Next up, edamame.  For those who weren't aware, edamame is just soybeans.  Being as how the US is the main producer of soy in the world (almost a third!), I figured this would be the easy one.  Wrong.  Every package I found: Made in China.  But according to Wikipedia, China only produces 7% of the total world consumption of soybeans!  So where are the American soybeans going?  In the end, I had to pass them up; I just couldn't find a package that wasn't made in Chine.  (Also, upon returning home, I found that my last remaining bag, bought at Winco, was also made in China.  WTF?!)

Next, sugar.  I made a beeline for C&H - if anyone has American sugar, it would be them!  Turns out no.  They had sugar from all over South America, but nothing from the US.  In the end, the only sugar we could find from the US was the Safeway brand, but since it's finely granulated, it's not what we need.  (In that moment, Shannon and I both realized why Alton Brown always says to measure by weight rather than volume.  I almost suggested we buy a scale....but decided that would take us from the task at hand.  Maybe a scale another time.)

Lastly, Saltines.  This time we could only find distributors - no one would tell us where the crackers were made.  Except Safeway brand.  Which was made in the US again.  I have to say that I'm gaining a little more respect for them, big chain or no.  In the end, though, we decided that Shannon would make them from scratch, like he's been promising to do for a couple months now.  We'll see how it goes.

Finally, off the the veggie store.  Going here scared me almost as much as going to Safeway.  Although the Valley is a great place to get fresh local produce, we're just coming off the winter, so nothing's growing yet.  When we walked up, I just prayed that California would cover us on this one: I hear they're already up over 80 degrees in L.A.  Here's what I found:

Mangos: Mexico
Filipino mangos: Mexico
Mandarin organes: California!  Woot!
Pineapples: Hawaii!  Woot!
Tomatoes: Mexico
Avocados: California!
All others (broccoli, zucchini, cabbage): who knows?

I can already tell that this produce thing is going to be difficult.

We grabbed some oranges, avocados, and a pineapple and headed home.  As we went, I came up with another question:

Can I buy products from companies that aren't American, if their products were made in the US?

This isn't something I ran into today, but an important question.  For example, if I find a chocolate bar made in the US, but produced by Nestle (a Swiss company), is it okay to buy?

I have to admit that I wasn't expecting this whole thing to be quite so difficult.  Maybe it's just food that's this difficult, but I doubt it.  Looks like this'll be an interesting year.