Vera Schabicki

My name is Vera and I love to eat.

Four years ago my five children, one husband, two dogs, one cat and I moved to the rural South from a large northern California city. We went from .12 acres to a rambling 57 acres.

My eating style has evolved over the years from the Campbell's soup casserole of the seventies to being lucky enough to live in the north end of Boston in the eighties. I am not sure what it is like now but then it had a little shop in the basement where they made just one kind of pizza (you didn't say what you wanted, just how many pieces), several bakeries with luscious biscotti and cannoli ... espresso shops…a vegetable shack with all sorts of strange fresh things I had never seen (broccoli raab?), a calamari shop, a dry goods shop with different spices and coffees, wonderful new things to try (Who knew that parmesan cheese came in a block not a green can?), and many kind old Italian people who welcomed a single stranger into their community.

Having children started me thinking about the quality of food so I radically switched to a vegetarian organic diet. (I have it on good authority that I was a bit of a pain to be around.) I have remained committed to eating organic. In California this was about as difficult as falling off a log. We had a natural foods co-op, several farmers markets and I belonged to a CSA (and we had a (weep, weep) Trader Joe's).

Life here in my part of the South is a little different. I can and do drive for an hour each week to a national chain "natural" grocery store. They have nothing, I repeat, nothing local. They even import collard greens (to the South!) from California. I try to go to the farmers markets - they are all over an hour away and are none open year round. And I have tried to garden. I do not know how people survived in the past.

It seems funny to drive an hour to get food that has been shipped over 2000 thousand miles just so it can be organic ... but I have real concerns about the health of my children and the health of our world in regards to "conventionally" grown food.

I wanted to participate in this project because I really want to do my best to figure out how to eat a local, healthy diet. This is not just academic either. People in my community are riddled with diabetes, obesity, cancer ...

I am 45 years old. I was an ICU nurse before becoming a full time homeschooling mom, and my husband is a software engineer (with a very long daily commute). I have 17, 15 and 14 year old girls and 12 and 8 year old boys.