GROWING LOCAL: WILD MAINE BLUEBERRY MUFFINS

The documentary project Growing Local seeks to raise awareness across cultures of the importance of supporting locally produced foods. Growing Local travels to places such as Maine, USA, and Yorkshire, England, where it examines traditional but popular recipes and adapts them using only local ingredients. Through still photography, ambient sound, and audio interviews, each volume of the series documents not only the creation of the adapted recipe, but also traces the ingredients’ origins, the history of the recipe, and researches the current status of the region’s local food movement.
By documenting the efforts of small, local food producers, Growing Local hopes to shift public attention back to the necessity of supporting one’s neighbors (instead of huge corporations). The ingredients connect us with the lives of the producers. Growing Local has the potential to attract a global audience and convey the importance of supporting local foods to strengthen local economies. Growing Local will be made available for public presentation in various iterations—on DVD, as an enhanced e-book, printed book with accompanying DVD, delivered via the Web and traditional broadcasting methods, and more.
In 2007, I began researching the first volume of the series: Growing Local: Wild Maine Blueberry Muffins. In that volume I created and documented an award-winning wild Maine blueberry muffin recipe that consisted of ingredients grown and harvested solely in the state of Maine. This thesis project presents a DVD (in POCKET) with a selection of multimedia segments from Growing Local: Wild Maine Blueberry Muffins, which include: Introduction; Wild Maine Blueberries; Butter; Milk & Eggs; and Maine: The State of Local Foods. The award-winning paper (Maine Studies Graduate Award for Research and Creativity), Maine: The State of Local Foods, also accompanies this reflection paper to provide further context on why I believe that Maine, by its own example, is leading the nation toward a more vibrant and self-sustaining local foods economy.