What is the planet happy to give me to eat today?

Yallingup Wood Fired Bakery, Dunsborough, Western Australia uses locally grown biodynamic flour. Photo credit: my bro.

Let's flip around the concept of looking in a recipe book for something that we would like to cook, heading off to the supermarket to buy the required ingredients then coming home to make that for dinner.

Most of us love a little food homage whether admiring the artfully plated meals on MasterChef or glistening images in Donna Hay magazine.  They entice us to create such a delectable dish, but often without thought for whether the planet has those ingredients to offer us sustainably right now.

If we reverse that process, we can instead go the local farmers' market or grocery store, buy what we know has been grown locally and freshly harvested (or even browse our own veggie patch), then look in our recipe books to find a dish that can be crafted from the produce.

For me, the meal at the end of this approach nourishes our family with more than nutrients, it connects us with the earth and the people that grew the goods, and enhances our contentment with life.

Some tips to help you move towards more sustainable food choices:

• Do what you can.  Don't be overwhelmed by changing everything, just open your mind to the possibilities and start!
• Try researching just one food a week to see if you can find a locally grown alternative. 
• Choosing a final product made in your area is a great start, but you can also move on to thinking about where the ingredients were grown.
• Define your own limits for "local" - for example, 200 km may work in the city but not for those living in remote areas.
• It may be challenging to find alternatives, but there are resources to help - seek and you'll find. 

One of the greatest joys of a local, seasonal food approach is that it simplifies life.  You might think it is more complicated, but actually, limiting choice is liberating.

About Yallingup Wood Fired Bread

We visited Yallingup wood fired bakery in December 2013.  Hand crafted, traditional wood fired bread is baked fresh every afternoon (check the time, but usually comes out around 4pm).   Western Australian Certified Biodynamic grown grain is stone milled to the finest flour, gently kneaded in a slow moving dough mixer and fermented over many hours. The loaves are hand-moulded and rested, then baked in wood fired ovens built from volcanic stones.