The concept of eating locally shouldn't stop at home.
As we ease - slowly - through the laziest month of the year, travel becomes top priority for many of us. And travel means food. Who hasn't picked a vacation destination because of a great restaurant at the end of the road, or scheduled the trip around your beach town's weekly farmers' market day?
OK, maybe you don't take your road food considerations to that extreme, but I do. Local eating doesn't have to stop at your state line. Local is wherever you are at the time, so as you map out your pit stops, eschew gas station snacks for another sort of roadside sustenance. Driving through Maryland's Eastern Shore on the way to the beach? You're sure to find sweet corn or an even sweeter cantaloupe at a roadside stand. Maine in August? Don't leave without sampling the wild blueberries in season now. Seek out the local ice creamery, the local brewery, or the dockside fishmonger who will sell you something right off the boat and know you're taking your food politics on vacation too.
It's a concept I routinely embrace while traveling; I pack little food, knowing I'll probably find all the car snacks and dinner ingredients we'll need while getting wherever we're going. On a recent trip through Vermont, my husband and I made stops at several small-scale creameries to sample their cheeses. The Vermont Cheese Trail (think wine trail, but with bovines, not grape vines) offers visitors an opportunity to drop in at creameries large and small, meet the cows or sheep or goats (and their farmers), sample their cheese and buy some for the drive home.
It's a great concept, but go forewarned: these are actual working farms spread throughout the state, so even if the trail brochure notes farms are open daily, be sure to call before driving the back roads to get there only to find a locked tasting room. We dropped in on several to find no one around to introduce us to Bessie or sell us some cheese.
But those we found staffed with flocks and farmers more than made up for the disappointment at others. We stuck mostly to sheep dairies because of my husband's lactose intolerance, and at Woodcock Farm between Weston and Londonderry, we met Mark Fischer and his flock of East Friesian sheep - referred to as the Holstein of the sheep world - and sampled an aged, alpine-style cheese and a soft, Camembert-smooth wheel he calls "Summer Snow." We spent the next several days spreading the unctuous creamy goodness on crackers we found at a farmers' market the day before while driving the back roads of New England.
But we didn't get to those roads before we dropped in on Willow Hill Farm in Milton, mostly because locals told us we had to try the sheep yogurt there. We found farmer David Phinney tending to a newborn calf - Willow Hill raises both sheep and cows - but he sent us up to the cheese-making room to have a look around and help ourselves at the self-serve coolers there. The declining economy had halted yogurt production for now, but we happily came away instead with a pyramid of the farm's buttery, bloomy rind Alderbrook and a half-round of its Summertomme, a soft sheep cheese coated in herbs. More road snacks.
So many, in fact, I got really good at balancing a cheese board, a knife and the bag of crackers on my lap in the car. With all that cheese, it really was a lap of luxury.