My Grain Headaches

Locavore carb porn.

Lately, I've had more headaches. But there's nothing duller than a blog-drone about ailments--except maybe symptom tweets--so rest assured that this entry is not about actual headaches, but the figurative ones that come from searching out locally produced grains.


These turn out to be mild, lately. In her book on a year of locavoraciousness, Barbara Kingsolver reported that finding local grains was one of the hardest things to do, down there in the Virginia-Kentucky border highlands. Local corn is widely available, if you are willing to take it in flammable liquid form. But here, in the last month, I've found oats from an Oregon mill and wheat flour from a Bellingham mill. 


Not from my county, but then again, grain in southwest Washington is just substrate for fungus, and we don't want any ergotine madness breaking out, now do we? So we send geoducks out and ship in grain in return. Most of it is in innocuous bags that don't really say where it cam from, but what can you expect from a commodity distributed by a national grocery chain? They buy the commodity where it is cheapest, and pour it in the same bag everywhere. 


Local mills used to exist nearly everywhere before trains, and now trucks make it all the easier to fan out from a few mega-mills to the rest of the country. If there is any logic, the flour I buy at the Tumwater Safeway came from eastern Washington, but there's no telling; it may have crossed the Continental Divide to get here. The "local" mills a couple or three hours south and north of where I live are the closest source I know of, and Fairhaven even says only that they try to obtain northwest grain, which presumably means that sometimes it may come from somewhere further afield.


As with many items in the locavore pantry, there is an issue of expense, and as usual, the effect depends on your focal length. Close up, the flour is expensive, maybe twice what the generic store brand costs. But back away, and home-made bread or pizza dough, even with that precious local flour, earns back that money in a jiffy compared to buying a loaf of bread or a frozen pizza. Local organic products may be more expensive than the grocery commodity version shipped in from who knows where, but they cannot begin to approach the cost of processed foods. Sweat equity is not a term you hear much in the culinary realm, but it applies here. 


And the oatmeal? I think it was actually cheaper than the generic mystery-source brands. 


If these local grains are available right beside the usual stuff in Safeway and Top supermarkets, if locavore consumers don't have to go to the expensive artisan-food section or a specailty organic market to find it, then there is hope that local farmers and mills can make a decent profit. 

I'm not a huge believer in the Free Market, if such a thing actually exists, but I have to think that the easier availability of local grain means that the marketers have recognized a niche with potential. If more people buy it, there may be room for more farmers and producers. The more this happens, the less our money flows out of the region. When the farmers are more secure, so are a range of things from our food supply to the flow of lease money to the School Trust. 


It's a good deal.