By Kristie Snyder,
Eating locally is a noble goal, but any Ithacans baking bread with Farmer Ground Flour, grown and milled locally, may not realize how good they have it. Finding local flour is all but impossible in most of this country, and Canada, too. When a Vancouver couple decided to spend a year eating only food grown within 100 miles of their home, flour became their holy grail. Authors of the 2007 book, Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100 Mile Diet, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon spent eight months deprived of pasta, bread, crackers, pizza and all the other delights that ground wheat can provide. While a previous search yielded nothing but a tubful of weevil-infested wheat berries liberally sprinkled with mouse droppings (which was, reluctantly, discarded), they did finally locate a supply of wheat flour grown within 100 miles of Vancouver. A baking frenzy ensued.
“We were back in the familiar world of carbohydrate loading, and yet it was not the same. I had never imagined the difference fresh flour would make,” wrote MacKinnon. “Everything we made we ate simply, letting the flavor of the wheat stand alone. It tasted -— ancient. We would sit together to break the bread. A sacred act.”
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