It’s summer. Fish are swimming upriver, berries are coming out, and gardens are lush with food.
A Haines group challenges residents to make the most of this local bounty.
Local foods are good for our health, good for the planet, and good to eat. To promote all this goodness, a coalition of groups in Haines is organizing a local foods challenge. Community members can sign up, and commit to eating local foods for a week.
Tracy Wirak-Cassidy is the education coordinator at the Takshanuk Watershed Council and an organizer of the event.
She says participants can choose their level of commitment.
Wirak-Cassidy: “They can choose bite size, which is one local ingredient that they’ll eat every day for the entire week, they can choose full plate, which is an entirely local meal once a day, all week, or they can go locavore, and eat all local, all week.”
The challenge runs from August 5th through the 13th. Activities are planned to keep participants engaged.
Wirak-Cassidy: “We’ll have Yoga & Salad in the Marvin Garden, a cooking class with Travis Kukul, Mardell will be teaching folk how to use all these extra zucchinis or extra kale to make really some fun recipes.”
Wirak-Cassidy says participants do not need to fish or be master gardeners to sign up. Stores in town sell locally grown vegetables and locally caught fish. The farmer’s market is every Saturday. Berries are free for the picking And beach greens line the shores.
The week will end with a potluck open to everyone.
Wirak-Cassidy: We want this to be an opportunity to share. How did they get so many local foods? How did the locavores do it? What are the challenges we face as a community? Not everyone has equal access to these local food items. We want to find a way to be able to distribute food so that everyone is getting to enjoy all this delicious food that we grow and harvest here in our valley.”
To take up the challenge, follow this link,
