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.