| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| HTA ID | HTA-0575 |
| Title | Year Without a Supermarket — Rachel Hoff and Tom Ferguson |
| Era | KRON-TV (San Francisco, ~2009–2013) |
| Station | KRON-TV Channel 4 |
| Program | KRON4 News Weekend |
| Role | Host / Reporter / Interviewer |
| Segment Type | Interview |
| Duration | ~4:16 |
| Source File | 1087434_10200193979911523_4380_n.txt |
| Record Version | V1 (Transcript Only) |
Henry interviews a Vallejo couple who spent a year growing their own food or buying only from farmers markets, saving $8,000.
00:00 Welcome back to Cron 4 News Weekend. 00:02 So imagine a year without a supermarket, a year without a grocery store, a year without processed food. 00:10 Imagine that you are this couple, Rachel Hoff and Tom Ferguson. 00:15 They live in Vallejo, and they have decided, they decided just over a year ago, that they were going to do this, 00:20 that they were going to either grow their own food or go to a supermarket, not to a said, go to a farmer's market, get it, or from their friends. 00:28 And, well, we have the results here. 00:30 So your motive in doing this was what, please? 00:33 We wanted to make sure that we knew what our food, where it came from, what was on it, what wasn't on it. 00:40 And then we also wanted to make sure that the farmers that grew our food got all the money that we spent on that food rather than going through middlemen. 00:50 So that's an important point. 00:51 When you go into a supermarket, where's that food coming from? 00:57 It's coming from all over the country. 00:58 I meant they get it from the farm, truck it off the farm, put it in a distribution center, 01:03 take it to another distribution center from there, then it goes out to the supermarkets 01:06 and then maybe some small local places too. 01:09 So there's probably four or five different people involved in the middle of it. 01:12 So ideally, you grow as much of your own food as you can and you've done a remarkable job. 01:17 You've got a quarter of an acre and you decided, well, we're going to grow as much of this 01:21 as we can. 01:22 Right. 01:23 So how's it going? 01:24 How did it go right from the start there? 01:26 It was actually surprisingly easy and we were able to grow for the last three months we 01:35 produced all our own food. 01:37 Really? 01:37 Yeah. 01:38 And so what are you doing? 01:40 Are you growing enough for yourselves? 01:42 Too much? 01:42 What do you do with excess? 01:43 I think we grow just enough, maybe a little extra because we do, you know, we have a lot 01:48 going on so we do like to help the neighbors out. 01:51 I mean, not help them out but maybe kind of bribe them a little bit because, you know, 01:54 We do have animals and sometimes they get a little loud and so we give out produce and 02:00 some preserves to them. 02:02 Have you got any idea how much you saved? 02:06 Well we've produced about $9,000 worth of food. 02:09 Wow. 02:10 Huh? 02:11 I was saying wow. 02:13 And then when you take out what we spent because we keep track of everything, we've 02:17 come with a net savings of about $4,000. 02:21 And then another $4,000 we've saved just by not going to the grocery store. 02:26 How much work is this? 02:28 You've got a quarter of an acre, which is not a huge space, but maybe more than most people have, certainly. 02:33 How much effort, how many hours are you putting in here? 02:36 Well, it depends. 02:37 I think before the grow season, early spring, late winter, there's a lot of work to get the soil prepared for the summer crops. 02:46 But honestly, two or three days of that to get it going. 02:49 And then all of our critters, they're all on a regular schedule, so they're pretty easy. 02:53 And then those couple weekends, we get everything in the ground and then just kind of get laid back from there. 02:59 It's probably an average of an hour a day. 03:01 That's it? 03:02 Yeah. 03:02 That's how much I spend the grocery shopping. 03:04 Yeah. 03:04 So what about people who don't live on a quarter of an acre who live in an apartment or something? 03:10 You know, they can still help them remove grocery stores by finding farmers and going to the farmer's market 03:18 and finding independent stores that source local food. 03:21 The first few months that we did this, we didn't have anything in the ground. 03:25 So we had to get our food elsewhere. 03:27 And, you know, we found... 03:29 Farmers markets. 03:29 Farmers markets, yes. 03:30 And then we also found that we were buying much higher quality food, 03:34 but because we're processing it ourselves, we're spending a lot less money. 03:37 Okay. 03:38 So if you would like to find out more about these folks and their great program, 03:44 they've got a blog, and it's quite entertaining. 03:46 The Year Without Groceries is at blogspot.com with a recipe for rabbit on there, I might mention. 03:52 I'm just looking at it. 03:53 And you can watch a video about Rachel and Tom's farm, and that's at the thrive.wholefoods.com. 04:02 Whole Foods is running a series on something very similar to this, other programs like this. 04:07 Thank you both very much for joining us. 04:09 Thank you for bringing breakfast, lunch, and dinner for all of us. 04:14 Marty? 04:14 For the next several days. 04:16 Thank you, Henry.