Exploration of a Food Shed in Bloom

By Max Morange

On Friday night, September 2, 2005, I thought about breakfast—not just any breakfast, however, but the all-local breakfast I would eat the next morning before setting up my booth at the Bellingham Farmers Market.  I had been planning the logistics of Sustainable Connections’ Eat Local Week since early August, talking to chefs and farmers, researching recipes and thinking about the gastronomic bounty that the Northwest has to offer at this harvest time of year.  Along with forty-one other local food advocates, I had pledged to eat entirely within Whatcom, Skagit, and Island Counties for the week leading up to the annual Slow Food & Farm Friends Harvest Dinner.  The idea was to celebrate our local food shed and raise awareness about the vast array of food available right in our own “backyard,” but I realized at 8pm on that Friday night that I had forgotten to go grocery shopping.  There wasn’t much in my house that I could eat come Saturday morning.

In all of my focus to create the infrastructure for Eat Local Week, I had neglected to set up my own pantry.  I had worked out several potlucks in the following week, had thought a lot about where I might go to get locally grown, caught or raised grocery items, had even researched where I could find the specialties like cheese and nuts that make eating a joy for me.  What I hadn’t done was actually go and get any of it.

Three-quarters of an hour after this jarring realization, I bustled back to my kitchen loaded with ten pounds of russet, Yukon and Fingerling potatoes, seven large sweet onions, a bag of brilliant orange carrots, a weighty green bell pepper, and a flat of thirty beautiful brown free-range organic eggs. As I stocked my cupboard with these goods, I pondered the bags of rice and pasta, the cornmeal and beans that I pushed aside and which usually give structure to my meals.  “How much do I really get from my local farmers after all?” I thought to myself.  Apparently not as much as I believed.

As the week progressed, I found my repertoire expanding and my attitude shifting for the positive and more adventurous.  What had at first seemed a scant selection of items from which to make up my diet became by the end of the week an invitation to explore the deep and delicious field of locally produced food. Those few ingredients that initially seemed left to me by virtue of their local growth soon became the invitation to try other, more unusual vegetables and foods that I had never before noticed in my local grocery market or on the farms near my house.  The pedigree of tubers, edible greens, and berries that found their way into my kitchen became successively more complex and consequently much richer.   To my delight, I found that buffalo and grass-fed beef made wonderful additions to recipes calling for pork or tofu.  I could make my own butter with the cream from raw milk.  I have never had such vibrant and delicious salads.  Hazelnut tea stood in marvelously for my morning cocoa.  I have been inclined long after Eat Local Week to incorporate into my cooking the flavor discoveries from that culinary journey.

My experience working with the chefs of the restaurants that participated in celebrating our local food shed gave me an even more profound respect for those men and women and wonderful things that they could make with all local ingredients.  Each talked of the challenges that he or she faced in cooking locally not as real obstacles, but rather as puzzles to be faced and overcome by the inspired craft of the profession. 

Praise poured into my mailbox each day from Eat Local appreciators and pledgers after each participating chef and restaurant had made their mark upon the culinary register of the season.  Not satisfied by simply combining the local items that he or she already used in a regular menu, each chef worked to create a menu item truly inspired by the spirit of the week.  Even after hearing several testimonials, I was still impressed (but not surprised) to learn of the trials and tribulations that accompanied such endeavors as drying salt or beginning to smoke salmon at 2am for the following evening’s special.  The chefs had suggestions for ways of expanding the event in the coming years as well.  Fred Berman, owner of Pastazza, proposed that the restaurant might feature various levels of locality.  A chicken, he pointed out, might have been raised locally, but where, he wondered, was the source of its feed? 

David and Judith Laws were two of many pleased diners (as well as being Eat Local devotees); they had decided to spend their summer vacation money by eating out at each participating restaurant.  They wrote to tell me of their experience one day, saying, “We ordered the Eat Local tasting menu at Mannino's Italian Restaurant, and after our first taste, we looked at each other and said, ‘This tastes like real food, just picked out of the garden.’ What a surprise to have Chef Sam Crannell come out and tell us that indeed, he had gone out early that morning and gathered the food we were eating from farms in Whatcom County.”  When I called to congratulate Sam, he told me how pleased he’d been to be a part of the program. “[Cooking and eating local] is the way to go.” You can count me in next year.” 

While I cannot say that during Eat Local Week I forgot entirely about those favorites that originate far from my home, I did experience a changed appreciation for them after the week had passed.  Chocolate, for instance, or a banana on breakfast cereal, were things that I was very pleased to re-admit to my diet.  When they have graced my taste buds in the month since Eat Local Week, however, I have been more conscious of their foreignness to the culinary landscape of my home.  The point of the week was not to limit the range of our diets any more than it was to test self-control, but, having eaten all local and expanded our knowledge about and taste for the wonderful array of delicious food grown practically on our doorsteps, my hope is that we will continue to seek out and celebrate those local specialties and farm fresh staples that make this place agriculturally and culinarily distinct.