eat local (it's hip)...

every tuesday my mailbox gets jammed with mailers from local grocery stores. we have four of them, not including the trader joe's, so it's a lot of mail. mail which normally just gets tossed into the recycle bin, as we do 99% of our shopping at tj's and the farmers markets. 

well, i happened to have a bit of time last tuesday (yes, this topic has been on my mind for awhile), and decided to read lucy the ads (she totally dug it--brand new picture books, in her opinion). i was surprised to see that 3 out of the 4 supermarket ads featured "locally grown" icons on their produce pages--making it clear which items were grown close-to-home as opposed to, you know, new zealand and the like. 

i'm interested if this kind of mainstream awareness (a.k.a "hopping on the locally grown bandwagon") is happening in other parts of the country. i know that here in california, we're home to a lot of farms that grow a LOT of food--much of what the supermarkets carry is local by the very nature of things. but i've never seen it called out before. and i kind of like it. 

then i stopped into trader joes and saw a sign that said "locally grown in brentwood" on an apricot display. i was doubly surprised, because i've suggested to the tj's management on several occasions to label locally grown stuff and was told that they cannot do it since they don't have knowledge of where the product comes from--everything is shipped from a remote warehouse. all they see are the same labels we see: product of u.s.a., product of mexico, etc. i wonder then, how did they know those apricots were brentwood apricots? and is it safe to assume that my apricots (i bought them) went from brentwood (40 minutes away) to the warehouse (who knows where) back to the store for stocking? is that still considered local?

the apricots rotted quickly. just sayin'.