Eating Locally & Seasonally: A Community Food Book for Lopez Island by Elizabeth Simpson

As the world faces the conundrum of simultaneous hunger and food waste, pandemics, climate change, depletion of natural resources, species extinction, water, soil, and air pollution, and chronic illnesses, we see that individuals can make an enormous difference by the way they live, eat, and treat the world around them. Eating local and seasonally-produced food is probably the most important step because it is a step all of us can take. The book contains some 385 recipes from Elizabeth & Henning’s kitchen with adiscussion of the history and nutritional benefits of each food. Every chapter beginswith a discussion contrasting small-scale, local farming with industrial agriculture, andshows how transporting foods from far away not only burdens the environment butdepletes the nutritional value and safety of the food. -Arlen Coiley Hundreds of straightforward recipes, garnered from fifty years of growing their own food at S & S Homestead and organized by easy-to- navigate chapters, are provided to give a framework to learning to eat, not only a local, but a seasonal diet. This adds a new dimension to the fun of supporting farmers markets in summer and fall; in winter we must depend on what we’ve preserved from the harvest. Therefore, this bookis also a primer for the whole range of preservation techniques - canning, drying, fermenting, freezing, pickling, juicing, salting, and dry- storage. Making sausage and broth, baking bread, crafting homemade pasta are some of the highlights in store for anyone who is hungering to know more about how to live the way many of our forebears did, close to the land and its animals, nurturing plant diversity, and in everyseason cherishing the planet and all its gifts. -Andy Finley, Transition Lopez Island