I want to thank everyone for the kind comments on the giveaway post. I’ve been deliberately abstaining from responding there in order to keep the comments just from readers since I use those counts to generate the drawings numbers. But I do want to address this one comment in particular from Mama2Joel:
“What were for your first steps when you decided to start living sustainably? I don’t even have a garden anymore! Well, or a house for that matter, haha. We had a house fire but should be back in our home by august, but that is too late to start a garden. So I figured this spring/summer/fall I will buy from local farmers (I live in WNY and we have tons of farms around here) and I would like to try my hand at canning come fall. I suppose I will just have to wait until next spring to really start trying to live sustainably?”
I have a long and boring entry here describing how I started out but essentially I was planning to buy everything at the farmer’s market just like you.
Once I started reading gardening books like “Fresh Food from Small Spaces” and “Four Season Harvest” I decided to rip out the lawn and try to grow as much as I could. I had no idea what that meant but last summer far exceeded anything I felt was even possible. I grew enough food to keep us in veg all year! Granted I live in Seattle where we can grow some things year round but I didn’t realize at the time we could do that. The Four Season Harvest book is written by Elliot Coleman who gardens year round in Maine so that may give you in colder climes some inspiration and tools.
I am still buying some fruit since all the trees and vines are second year but I’m seeing lots of apples and cherries and the strawberries, raspberries and blueberries are producing this year. In another few years we’ll (hopefully) have 22 kinds of fruits or berries to eat in addition to the veg.
We have eggs from our chickens and this summer I’m hoping to add meat rabbits since they are the most efficient converters of food with the least environmental impact and take up little space in the city.
The biggest thing I did, however, was to buy a grain grinder and buy bulk whole grain berries. If you stop buying processed grain based foods from the grocery store you will have laid the foundation you need to make the rest of your transition seamless. That is the hardest part – keeping us in bread, crackers, granola, muffins, pancakes and tortillas. But just think of all the food additives, the manufacturing processes, the transportation and packaging that goes into those items. They represent all that is wrong with our picture of food and what we are doing to the planet and our bodies.
It’s easy to buy local veg or meats instead of what you are getting now from the grocers simply by finding local butchers and farmers markets. The real transition is the processed foods.
So what we’ll be focusing on in our makeover is the pantry. I’ll be sharing replacements and recipes for pantry items when we do the makeover but I’ll also be asking those of you who didn’t win the makeover for a list of items you really want to get out of your pantries, or find replacements for things you maybe don’t really want to get out but want to make healthier.
I would love for us all to brainstorm and help each other out – let’s convert EVERY readers pantry!
I can’t wait to do this giveaway tomorrow night. In the meantime go to your pantry and look inside. Let’s clean it out!
What a great giveaway! Four month into our year of whole foods, I didn’t feel like we would be the most efficient entry for you, but we do have a few things on our sacred cow list that I would love to brainstorm out of over the next eight months.
Can’t wait to see this one infold.
Oh, Mama Papaya is a sneaky one
Of course my friend and sustainable-living mentor reads your lovely blog…and didn’t tell me 
haha.. 
I totally agree with the grain mill- I couldn’t have afforded to make all our wheat bread if I’d had to purchase flour instead of wheat berries. PLUS, I’ve never seen bulk whole wheat flour, but I can purchase 50-pound-sacks at our cannery inexpensively. (I’m not sure if it’s local or not, but baby steps… 
Hi, I’ve been wondering for awhile now about the benefit of buying wheat berries and grinding them yourself versus buying already-ground whole wheat flour. I but 5 lb. bags of flour for 2.19 each, which sounds good in comparison to what I’ve read is the cost of berries, maybe 50 cents per pound. If cost is not the issue, then is it the processing it gets in the factory? I suppose factory processing might be more intense than what you do at home…. Thanks in advance for your insight!
Hi Fun Momma,
The wheat berries I buy for 36 cents/pound are organic – is your flour organic at that price? Here in Seattle at least it’s around $7/5# of organic whole wheat flour.
But also think of the wheat berry as an apple. The minute you slice it oxidation begins and the nutrients start to degrade. That happens when you grind flour as well. Whole wheat flour goes rancid very quickly, which is partly why white flour became so popular once people found the technology to sift it. Many rural areas didn’t have large mills so flour was carried across the west by stage coach and it was white flour because the nutrients that would begin oxidizing had been removed.
I notice a huge difference in smell between freshly milled flour and store bought flour now.
Where do you get your wheat berries? Where did you buy your grain grinder? THANKS!
Hi Linda,
I get the grains from Lentz spelt or Bluebird. They both have buying clubs where you can go in with friends and buy large quantities to get a discounted price. If you google them you can email them for details.