by Becky Lane

Created on: October 25, 2008

EVOLUTION OF A LOCAVORE

I have no idea how I ended up on this quest for "the good life." It certainly wasn't part of my rearing. Perhaps I was just born with a strong vein of common sense running through me. I come from a long line of city slickers who were very quick to embrace every modern domestic technology that came along. As far as I know, neither of my grandmothers ever grew a vegetable, did any canning or preserving, baked bread, quilted, or even nursed a baby, in their lives. The search for a better way began the day I realized that I had no cultural heritage whatsoever. Not even one single recipe from the "old country" had been lovingly passed down from one generation to the next. Heck, I didn't even know what the old country was! Later, I found myself wondering why so many families were moving away from the dinner table. It just made no sense to me.

The epiphany that took the longest time to unfold involved what we ate, and where it came from. It probably started when I left for college in Austin, and lived in a co-op on campus where we did our own cooking. That was the first time I ever tasted fresh asparagus, vine-ripened tomatoes, or mashed potatoes that didn't come out of a box. Then, as a young wife in Houston, I joined our neighborhood's vegetable co-op. We took turns going down to the farmers' market in pairs, to buy enough produce for everyone in the group to share. Much of what showed up on my doorstep was unfamiliar to me, but I found that searching out interesting ways to use it made cooking less boring, and raised the bar a notch on what I was willing to settle for on the table.

My husband's brother and sister-in-law were also living in Houston then, and occasionally we would join them on trips to Louisiana, where Priscilla's parents had retired. Her father was an Iowa farm boy, and he always kept a large vegetable garden, even when they had lived in the city. Her mother was a Cajun gal from a huge family, and could cook like nobody I'd ever known. She once said that cooking was her art, her means of expressing herself. What a novel concept that was, cooking just for fun! This may have been my first exposure to people who were actually living the good life. Their home, their active lifestyle, their creative outlets, their close ties to the community and to their heritage, their use of locally raised and produced foods, the whole Cajun culture of food, family and fun... All that left an indelible image in my head, and raised the bar on what

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