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Eating Local

When I started in the food service industry some years ago, there was a sense of pride in having ingredients flown or trucked in from distant lands. Stating this on the menu meant that you had some of the freshest and most exotic foods available. On any given night you may have had chanterelle mushrooms straight from France, baby squash from South America, and beautiful, pencil-thin asparagus direct from California on the same menu, quite possibly in the same dish. Today, of course, it’s more common for a chef to boast about how nearby their food was grown, often naming not the country of origin but the actual farm.

I also remember as a child digging elbow-deep into my Christmas stocking. Amidst the candy and small toys there would invariably be a fresh orange. My sisters each received one, too. Of course my hand would breeze past the orange as if it weren’t there, desperately seeking the candy and toys. But when I was older, I asked my mother why there was an orange in the stocking every year. She said it was a tradition carried over from when her mother was a little girl, and to have citrus fruit so far north was considered something really special.

Just stop for a minute and try to imagine an orange as something not commonplace but special, because it was in season, albeit in another part of the country. That’s difficult to fathom when supermarkets are bursting with every possible foodstuff from across the globe. In fact today it would probably be more difficult to imagine oranges not being available on any given day of the year. I must admit that it’s exciting to enter a store and be confronted by piles of beautiful fruits and vegetables. But at what cost?

Food miles is a term used to describe the distance food travels from where it is grown to where it is purchased for consumption. With today’s fragile economic state and awareness of global warming, it’s only common sense that reducing the food miles in the food you eat is the logical thing to do. According to the Web site of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, an increasing proportion of what we put on our tables is produced in other countries, and on average the typical American meal prepared at home contains ingredients from five countries. This trend has been steadily rising since the late 1960s.

Suggestions for eating well from locavore.com:

• Eat local.
• If not local, then organic.
• If not organic, then from a family farm.
• If not from a family farm, then from a local business.
• Go to the farmer’s market before the supermarket.


Local Farmers Markets:

Broadway Market Farmers Market
999 Broadway, Buffalo
May-October, Thursday & Saturday, 9am-5pm.

Clarence Farmers Market
10225 Main Street, Clarence
June-October, Saturdays, 7am-1pm

Downtown Country Market
at Buffalo Place
Main Street between Court & Church Streets, Buffalo
May-October, Tuesday & Thursday, 8am-2:30pm

East Aurora Farmers Market
East Aurora Plaza, East Aurora
May-November, Wednesday & Saturday, 7am-1pm

Ellicottville Farmers Market
Fillmore Street & Parkside Drive, Ellicottville
June-September, Thursday, 11am-2pm

Elmwood Village Farmers Market
Bidwell Parkway & Elmwood
Avenue, Buffalo
May-November, Saturday, 8am-1pm

Hamburg Farmers Market
Main & Buffalo Streets, Hamburg
May-November, Saturday, 8am-1pm

Kenmore Farmers Market
Parking lot between Lincoln & Mang, Kenmore
June-October, Saturday, 8am-1pm

Lockport Public Market
Walnut & Locust Streets, Lockport
May-October, Monday-Saturday, 9am-9pm

Niagara Frontier Growers
Co-op Market
Clinton Street & Bailey Avenue, Buffalo
Year round, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 7am-6pm; Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday 4:30am-6pm.


Links for locavores:

2milechallenge.com
100milediet.org
eatlocalamerica.coop
foodnotlawns.com
lexington.coop
locavores.com
localharvest.org
mompopsnaturalfoods.com
slowfoodbuffalo.org
urbanroots.org
wildfermentation.com

According to the Leopold Center, the average distance traveled for locally grown produce is just 56 miles, while the average conventional produce travels about 1,500 miles, almost 27 times further. These are sobering statistics that demonstrate just how disconnected we have become to being, well, local. It’s as if we’ve lost our sense of place.

What began as an underground food movement in the 1990s—spearheaded by Slow Food International—has gone completely mainstream, and a few years ago it actually got a name. Jessica Prentice, a West Coast chef, author, and longtime proponent of cooking by the season and eating locally coined the term locavore. It’s been so well received that in 2007 the New Oxford American Dictionary announced that it was the word of the year. Apparently she and some colleagues came up with the word a couple years prior when they challenged each other to eat foods that were grown or produced within a 100-mile radius of their home for one month. A movement was born.

Currently there’s a national campaign sponsored by the National Cooperative Grocer’s Association (NCGA) called Eat Local America; the Western New York resource is the Lexington Cooperative Market on Elmwood Avenue. “We’re the regional support for the challenge,” says Joann Tomasulo, membership coordinator at the Coop. “We’ll provide information, suggest books, where to get your food, and recipe sharing.” She also told me that currently there are about 80 people signed up, including a few local restaurants, but she’s optimistic there will be more. The challenge runs from August 15 to September 14 of this year.

I also recently spoke with Matt Bille, produce manager at the Coop, and asked him about the store’s local produce and if people request it. “As the local crops become available, we’ll have them,” he said. “At the height of peak season, we’ll have about 50 percent local.” He said that customers don’t just ask for local produce, they expect it. “We try to create longstanding relationships with local farmers that share our same values of sustainability,” Bille added.

Okay, that sounds great, but is it feasible? I personally do not know. And I also think that it’s no coincidence that the eat local challenge takes place at the height of our local growing season, making it much easier to accomplish the challenge. How would we manage in the dead of winter?

One Canadian couple chose to confront this question head on. For one year, Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon determined they would buy only food grown within a 100-mile radius of their Vancouver apartment in British Columbia. They went on to start the popular Web site, 100milediet.org. They admitted that, while not vegetarians, they have had to eat a lot of potatoes. This is an extreme version of the locavore movement; our local challenge is to eat about 80 percent local, with local meaning grown or raised within 200 miles of where you live. This in itself may be a bit of a challenge, because current statistics say that home-cooked meals are fewer and far between. Even if you purchase local ingredients, someone has to cook them.

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), an energy research branch of the United States government, people do in fact cook less at home than they used to, even less than they did just 10 years ago. Worse yet, there are now more fast food restaurants than ever before, which makes it increasingly easier to grab a quick and inexpensive, albeit unhealthy, meal. And who knows where the ingredients originated.

In the 1980s the term home meal replacement was coined, referring to a complete meal that you can reheat in your home to emulate something that was “home-cooked.” The phrase still makes the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. While these meal substitutes may have their place, in this cook’s opinion there is no replacement for a home-cooked meal, especially one prepared with local ingredients, better yet those that may have been grown in your own backyard.

I don’t believe that the locavore food movement is trying to convince us to eat 100 percent locally, but to eat as locally as we can. In the same way that a single vote can change an election, each of our efforts at eating local can have an impact; a journey starts somewhere, and it inevitably begins with the first step, no matter how big or small. There are a few ways that I personally began baby steps in this direction. One is that when I’m in a grocery store and see that there are two or more of the same product and one is local, I’ll purchase the local one. Another is simply to purchase foods that are in season. Tomatoes are a perfect example. They are in season in our region for little more than a month, from late July through August. Why do I need to eat a tomato in the winter when I can anticipate their arrival in the dog days of summer? The anticipation, after all, turns to appreciation. Tomatoes that are trucked in from far distances are picked green and artificially ripened so they can withstand the travel, hence the cardboard-like taste and texture. Biting into a tomato that is still warm from the sun and having the juice run down my hand is, to me, about as gourmet as it gets. There are plenty of other delicious vegetables that are in season during the cold months; tomatoes are not one of them.

My favorite way of eating locally is to grow my own.This is easier than one might think, though it’s an ongoing experiment for me. I’ve had a small backyard plot for some time, but a few years ago I got the idea to turn my front yard into a vegetable garden after stumbling onto the Web site Food Not Lawns (foodnotlawns.com). With a book by the same name, the authors proclaim that no matter how big or small your yard, its resources are more efficiently used by tearing out your grass and planting food. Currently I have more than 10 varieties of vegetables growing in the front of my house, weeds and all. I didn’t have a very big yard to begin with, but personally I find this to be much more fun than cutting grass.

Going green today is becoming trendier than wearing black in Soho. Really it’s just a way of returning to our roots, because it was only a short time ago (in the bigger scheme of things) that we did cook and eat locally without thinking about it. We are separated by a mere generation or two from eating locally as the standard rather than the exception, not out of choice but necessity, because that’s all there was. Canning, preserving, and cooking most (if not all) your meals at home—and getting the ingredients from a local source—was the norm. My hope is that the next food movement will be about food preservation, so we’ll get back to preserving our summer food throughout the winter. After all, this is what people did in climates such as ours for eons. Canning, salting, pickling, sausage making—these were the original ways to accomplish this. I know that I’m not the only one whose old house rests not on a basement but on a centuries-old root cellar.

This past Saturday I saw Matt Bille for just a few minutes, and he was exuberant. He had just returned from the Elmwood Farmer’s Market. “I just hooked up with this blueberry farmer and the berries are incredible,” he said. “We’ll have 25 flats here Monday morning.”

His enthusiasm was contagious. It made me realize there is hope yet.

My fantasy is that someday I’ll again work as cook in a small bistro. Only this time instead of bragging of the ingredients that were shipped across the globe to make it to my frying pan, they’ll have been brought to the back door by the farmer who grew them. And when customers ask me about a particular ingredient I’ll be able to tell them not only where they came from but ask if they’d like to meet the farmer who grew them; they would need only to turn their head, because the farner would be eating at the next table.

I recently read a New York Times article that said our state produces more apples than our residents can consume, but at the same time 75 percent of the apples sold in New York City were grown on the West Coast. My son is now a teenager, and much to his chagrin I still put out a stocking each year at Christmastime. And each year I’ll inevitably place an orange in it, as my parents and their parents have done before me. But this year, next to the orange—which probably will have been grown in California or Florida or some other warm climate—there will be nestled an apple, which at the time of typing these words is just small, unripe piece of fruit hanging from a tree somewhere in New York State. That, to me, will be really special.

Gazpacho
Yield: 4-5 cups

While this recipe may have originated far from Buffalo, all of the herbs and vegetables used to make it will be in peak season locally in just a few weeks.

2 cups diced tomatoes
1/2 cup diced red bell peppers
1/2 cup diced cucumbers
1/4 cup loosely packed fresh breadcrumbs
1/4 cup diced onion
1/4 cup virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
1 tablespoon hot pepper sauce
2 teaspoons minced garlic
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon basil
1/2 teaspoon oregano
Combine all of the ingredients in a large bowl and mix together. Transfer to a blender and process until desired consistency. Let stand at least 1/2 hour before serving. Serve chilled or at room temperature. Diced vegetable garnishes are optional.


Homemade Sauerkraut

If you want cabbage throughout the year but don’t want to buy it in off-season, do it the old fashioned way—salt and preserve your own kraut. It’s simple to make (just two ingredients), tastes better than anything you’d purchase, and eaten raw has great pro-biotic properties.

1 small head of cabbage and a little kosher salt

Remove the outer leaves of the cabbage and cut the head in half and then quarters. Cut out the core and discard it. Slice the cabbage as thin as you are able and put it in a large bowl. Sprinkle with two or three tablespoons salt and mix. Taste the cabbage; it should taste salty but not overly so. Transfer the cabbage to a container that is wide enough to fit a few small plates. Press the cabbage down with your hands and weight it with plates. Cover the container and leave at room temperature. After a day the cabbage should have released enough of its own liquid that it is submerged; if not, add enough salted water to cover the cabbage. After two or three days small bubbles will appear; after about a week or so it will begin to smell and taste distinctively sour.
Depending on the temperature of your kitchen, the cabbage will take between one and three weeks to sour completely. Taste it as often as you like and when the flavor is to your liking transfer the container to the refrigerator to slow its fermentation. The finished sauerkraut may be eaten raw as a side salad and digestive aid, or drained and cooked in any recipe that calls for it.


Sausage and Sauerkraut
Serves 4

1 small onion
1 carrot
1 clove garlic
4 small red skinned potatoes
2 cups sauerkraut
2 tablespoons olive oil
8 links smoked sausage
1 cup chicken broth
salt, pepper, and caraway seed

Peel the onion, carrot, and garlic; dice the onion and carrot, and mince the garlic. Wash the potatoes; drain and rinse the sauerkraut. Heat the oil in a large skillet and add the sausage, onions, and carrots. Cook the sausage and vegetables until they begin to brown and then add the garlic and cook for another minute. Add the sauerkraut, potatoes, and broth. Bring the broth to a boil then lower it to a very low simmer. Season with salt, pepper, and caraway. Cover the pan with a lid and cook it for 20-30 minutes. If the liquid evaporates too quickly add a little more broth.

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