Problems Arise (Local Food Challenge pt. 2)

     Not long into my personal challenge to eat only local foods, I had already run into a challenge: The biggest snowstorm to hit Oregon since I moved here three years ago. Public transit was unreliable, cabs refused to send drivers for me, and stores closed down. On top of all of this, it happened on the weekend that I was going to get groceries, so I was very low on food.
     It just so happens that I live literally next door to a chain grocery store that remained open through most of the bad weather. Unfortunately, their selection of local foods is very slim. I ended up getting what local produce that I could and eating light until I could get to some of the more out of the way natural grocery stores that carry all sorts of local goodies.
      This certainly shows a problem with eating only local foods, however. The availability of local food is already far behind that of imported food, and when something happens that causes that availability to drop even more it almost eliminates all of a local eater's options.
     Another problem--totally unrelated to weather--that I ran into was the issue of finding out what is local and what isn't. In my last post on the local food challenge, I said that I would find out what kinds of meats you can get locally. This actually proved to be challenging because many of the people that work in the grocery stores that I visited really had no idea and many times didn't seem very concerned with finding out for me. Added to this the fact that some of my favorite foods just aren't produced locally or even really within the country (I'm looking at you, cashews), and someone who is switching to a local diet is going to have some big hurdles to jump to get comfortable with this way of life.