"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself" -Tolstoy

Recently I had a thought. "What the hell am I doing?" This past year I opened a deli, my first business. I've opened restaurants for other people but this was the first time on my dime. We opened with the intention of sourcing local, seasonal products and raw ingredients and using traditional, natural methods making a relatively wide array of charcuterie, soups, sauces and the like. Every month we would do a multi-course dinner focusing on what we have around us, partly as a creative outlet and partly as a lure to the potential customer.

For the most part we've done just that. We hold two dinners a month, all of our meats come from B.C. We try and make a point of knowing the farms we use, the people that run them, how the animals are treated, what they eat, the whole kit. We try to use local dairy and local produce and we try and support other local businesses with similar interests.

The operative word unfortunately is "try". When you're growing a new business or even just getting through day to day life, inevitably some things fall through the cracks. We don't always have time to source every single ingredient. We're used to having pretty much anything available to us at anytime. Most of us don't have time to search around for whats available locally, especially when we can go to one store and buy pants, vegetables, drugs, meat and a computer.

Personally that last sentence is so fantastically absurd, it actually upsets me a little. Have we become so lazy that we can over look any ethical or moral issue with the way these products found there way to this "one-stop-shop" solely on the basis of convenience?

Of course not. It's also cheap.

We can buy a crate of pants and a palate of vegetables and a barrel of drugs for a few hundred dollars. What savings! Sure I don't need that palate of vegetables, and ya, research shows that a good percentage of us throw away nearly half of the food we buy, but if I bought them when I needed them I'd go broke!

Now I'm sure we're all smart enough to see that if we're buying these quantities of product and throwing away half (of the perishable stuff anyway), the perceived savings have gone. This isn't the major issue though. if you look a little closer here, the problem is a lot bigger.

It effects our health, our communities, our countries and ultimately the planet. I will digress here because it would take a team of writers a long time to explain the situation with the current consumer habits and it's social and economic ramifications, so I will avoid that for the time being. I will however post links to various literature explaining everything from the health benefits of eating seasonally and locally, to the economic benefits, to something scientist are calling "the perpetual global food crisis"

I should also point out that I'm not trying to down-play the day to day lives or business practices of the good people around me. That's not the point. As I said at the start, "What the hell am I doing?'

The answer, I'm going to change.

I've set this blog up to document the transition of my business from kinda local to all local. Everything we learn will be posted here, from where and when products are available to who and how they're being produced all the way to what to do with them. In the end, I hope to be using totally local, ethical, seasonal and sustainable foods and resources to run my shop.



In this effort, I'd like to ask all who read this to offer any information, advice or experience that they can share, so that for some this can be a guide or at least an inspiration to do the same.

Welcome to the Local Food Theory.