Dinner in Upstate New York

If home is truly where the heart is, then let it be known that my heart resides in upstate New York while my stomach resides right here in Cambridge, MA. Taking advantage of my day off this past week, I quickly traveled home to Oneonta, NY to visit my parents and grandparents. Driving through the Berkshires, blasting Tom Waits and Otis Redding, I reminisced the past few Christmas' I've spent in western Massachusetts at my friend Emily's farm in Shelburne Falls. Every house has an herb garden on the lawn, and the roadsides are speckled with colorful natives selling local fare.
Then, I get to Oneonta, the unofficial home of all things U.S. Foods is willing to peddle onto unsuspecting bargin shoppers and pass off as "real food." My family and I had takeout from a new "Mexican" place that had recently opened in my hometown. My mother was raving about the portion size being so huge. When we opened our to-go containers at my grandparents' kitchen table, her portion size comment reminded me of a Woody Allen quote: "The food in this place is so terrible ... and what small portions!"
While there is a veritable bounty of locally grown produce available in upstate New York, it is disheartening to see how dismal a showing these farmers make when competing against the might of all-powerful Wal-Mart superstores and deluxe Hannaford's locations that can easily undercut their prices. For this is ultimately the only thing that consumers do back home: bargin hunt. They come in from the mountains to stock up on healthy supplies of canned vegetables, sugary cereals, and the lot.
This poised a challenge to me: how can I get my family to start buying locally and enjoying the cornicopia of great food they have right around them. Well, I started by doing a little research. One of the most notable crops where I'm from is apples. Both the Fly Creek and Pie in the Sky cider mills are but minutes away from my parent's house. Those were easy. A little known location that I was always partial to when I was growing up was McCoy's Pure Raw Honey farm on Franklin Mountain. I remember taking field trips there when we were kids and eating raw honeycomb in our grubby little paws.
While this diatribe lends itself to a larger discussion of why people in lower-income locations resort to such easy ways out regarding cheap food, I simply wanted to let my parents know that there are alternatives very close to them that will in turn help the economy of our hometown. While Cambridge is very advanced in this kind of thinking, it was really nice to bring my parents along on my journey of food exploration.