I think it’s safe to say that every local food blog out there was created with the purpose of sharing the experience of eating local foods and hopefully convincing people to join in. We noticed a bit of a knowledge gap in that the costs of eating local foods was not often mentioned, which is why we started Nitty Gritty. We want to disspell the myth that eating local and/or organic food is too expensive.

One thing that I’m becoming more aware of because of this project is the limited variety of foods we eat. This is mostly my fault and not Joyce’s. I’m a very picky eater. I don’t like most cooked vegetables, for one thing. This makes the likelihood of a (insert your favorite cooked vegetable dish here) of showing up on Nitty Gritty pretty low. My concern is that my picky eating habits are ultimately going to limit the effectiveness of this project.

Joyce and I have decided to open Nitty Gritty up to anyone who’d like to contribute. If you’d like to share your favorite recipes and meal costs, feel free to sign up. Signup will remain open through the end of March. Everyone is welcome.

Anyone who signs up would be a Contributor. This means that your posts would be saved as a draft and would not appear immediately on the blog. Joyce and I will serve as Editors. Editing will be pretty darn minimal, and anything you contribute will show up under your own name, not ours. We’re doing it this way so we don’t get attacked by spam bots. The entire raison d’être for Nitty Gritty is to document time and money costs, so you’d have to include that information in your posts. That’s about the only specific requirement. Feel free to include a link back to your own blog, and even duplicate the post on your blog to serve your own readers. Anything you contribute here need not be exclusive to Nitty Gritty. Content on Nitty Gritty is covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license, which essentially states that anyone that uses your work must give you credit, no alterations to your work are permitted, and no commercial uses are allowed.

We don’t have normal Nitty Gritty posts for Saturday or Sunday because of an event we hosted at our house on Saturday. We call it T-Day 2. It’s a second Thanksgiving for our friends to get together because they of course all had family commitments in November. This was our third T-Day 2 and it was a lot of fun. Sunday’s dinner came from leftover food from Saturday.

You can read all about it on the main blog: T-Day 2 post.

Steve Balogh has asked us to submit a summary of our Nitty Gritty project each week to be posted over at Groovy Green. We’re happy to announce that the first summary is up.

We’d like to thank Steve for asking us to contribute to Groovy Green this way. We’re pleased to be part of something so worthwhile.

Welcome to our new project. We hope you’ll enjoy reading about the nitty gritty of eating local and organic foods each week - grocery lists, meal planning, cooking times, per-serving costs, etc. This is something we’ve been tracking for a while ourselves, and we decided it was time to share these details.

A special thanks to Steve Balogh over at GroovyGreen for the shout out! You made our morning today.

Welcome to Nitty Gritty, a small project of Low Mileage Food. The idea for Nitty Gritty has been bouncing around in my head for awhile. Often, when I mention that I cook most of our meals at home, I hear that cooking every day is too hard or too time consuming or too boring. Also, people who are working on eating more locally and more organically often hear charges that this way of eating is elitist, that it’s too expensive or too much work or just not possible on a day to day basis.

So, I propose to put it all out there for a year - what we eat, how much it costs us, how long it takes me to cook, how I cook and how I plan and how long the dishes take. In other words, the nitty gritty of eating more locally and more organically, and cooking at home most days of the year. I may be preaching to the choir, since most of our readers at LMF already do most of these things, but maybe I’ll change at least one person’s mind about all of this. If nothing else, it will be an interesting record for Jeff and I, and maybe we’ll think a bit more about where our grocery dollars go and how we’re eating. We decided to start a sub-blog for the project because we didn’t want these details to overrun the main blog. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys reading other people’s grocery lists (and I’ll confess, I’m one) then you’ll probably enjoy this, and I hope you’ll enjoy following us in this project this year.