“Locavoring” of the Menus of Our Restaurants – Is it Possible?
Website design By BotEap.comWhat is “Locavoring”? Is it even a real word? Well, it is now. 2007 was the year of the “Locavore”. The Oxford English Dictionary chose it as its word of the year. The “Locavore” movement encourages consumers to shop at farmers’ markets or even grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh local produce is more nutritious and tastes better. Locavores also avoid supermarket deals as an eco-friendly measure, since shipping food long distances often requires more fuel for transportation. Two years earlier, the phrase 100-Mile Diet was coined by James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, to describe their year-long local eating experiment. Her diet experiment consisted of eating food produced or grown within 100 miles of her apartment. This included not only local produce, but also ensuring that meat or dairy came from animals that ate local food and was packaged locally. It’s now mid 2008 and I bet only a handful of you have ever heard of or live in any way as Locavores or 100 Mile Dieters because committing to this virtuoso act is just too hard right now. !
Website design By BotEap.comWe have created a food culture in this country that ignores seasons, borders, and with it common sense. “We” are all the Chefs or restaurant operators in the country. Although many have tried to reinstate the traditions of locally inspired menus, as a group we are still part of the issues that drive climate change and poor nutrition in the most abundant food culture on the planet. Like many other voices in the commercial food industry, I have spent the last twenty years demanding easier access to non-local and out-of-season produce. This movement began in earnest with the restaurant and dine-in explosion that began in California in the early 1980s and spread across the country like wildfire that hasn’t slowed or stopped since. Due to influences from Jeremiah Tower, Alice Waters, and others, we were all on the hunt for imported cheeses, oils, artisan pastas, and canned tomatoes. We needed to have the same exotic fruits and vegetables that we saw on their menus. But California had the advantage of good weather, so much of the unique produce (arugula and radicchio, etc.) and artisan dairy (goat cheese and high-fat cream) that were readily available there had to be shipped to California. hundreds or thousands of miles for the rest of us to keep up. Importers of products, mainly from Italy and France, were well established on both coasts, but the rest of us had to catch up with our local distributors to bring these products to us with as little hassle and at the lowest possible cost.
Website design By BotEap.comIt got even more complicated when my creative brothers and I also demand products out of season throughout the year. We don’t plan on putting fresh raspberry desserts on our menus in February and creating recipes for our permanent menus with fresh vegetables like corn, new potatoes, and green beans, regardless of seasonality. We also wanted copious amounts of other products that never existed before. Products such as already chopped and selected chicken breasts, fresh boneless fillets of salmon, tuna and sea bass, all kinds of prime or prime quality cuts of veal, as well as a huge catalog of prepared or partially prepared foods that we would use to maintain our labor costs under control. Our vendors, their suppliers, middlemen, and manufacturers were happy to comply with all these “requests” and even upped the ante in some cases with some new foods (processed of course) or of their own creation. Together, the food manufacturing and restaurant industries created market demand where there was none before and now we are all paying dearly for it.
Website design By BotEap.comAnother interesting phenomenon was taking place while all this was going on in the dining rooms of restaurants and cafes across the country. The grocery retail market took notice and responded with a flurry of new food products. The restaurant industry had become a leader in food consumption. Supermarkets and retail food manufacturers responded to consumer demand for these new foods. So, without missing a beat, they stoked the fires of this food explosion by filling their aisles with out-of-season produce and never-before-seen imported foods. Then, to complete this “perfect storm” of consumerism, the American dining table at home began to fade into the shadows, becoming a place to drop off the mail rather than an evening gathering place for the family. Food manufacturers responded to this shift, or perhaps fueled it, with hundreds of convenience foods that virtually turned the kitchen from a place to cook real food meals into a reheat zone for microwaves and toaster ovens.
Website design By BotEap.comThe culture of abundance that we enjoy in this country has never been seen on this planet before and every day this prosperity costs us more and more in fuel and greenhouse gases. Weaning this culture off pre-made polenta, year-round fresh limes, and a seemingly permanent supply of fresh yellowfin tuna will be next to impossible. However, it must be done if we have any chance of reducing the carbon footprint created by this huge multi-billion dollar industry. According to the latest estimate, nearly 1/3 of the greenhouse gases released into our atmosphere were the result of one more aspect of food production in the United States alone. A profound and complicated change of this magnitude, to a market that is deeply rooted in our daily way of life, will unfortunately take time that we do not have and an effort from the entire population that has never been attempted. Now the questions are, how do we make the effort and if we do, will it be enough? Will changing to a cafe menu really alter our ability to sustain life as we would like? Frankly, I don’t know that answer and I’m not sure if anyone actually does. But I’d rather do something now and wait until it’s too late. The positive side is much better. Not only will we make an effort to save our environment, but I bet we’ll create some tastier and more interesting menus to boot. The way I see it, we (the movers and shakers of the restaurant industry) have to find a way to make all of the following happen, if not at the same time, then close together.
- Replace the old, local phobic menus with menus that are driven seasonally and as locally as possible.
- Demand products from local farmers. (Hopefully, this will create a new local farmers’ market that has been struggling to take hold until now.)
- Demand meat products from grass-fed, free-range animals. (Feeding with corn and other grains is expensive in fuel and greenhouse gases)
- Lobby the legislature to create laws and funds to support and enforce these market changes. (It will take laws and money to make any of this happen)
- Lobby the legislature to stop promoting the use of food for fuel (replacing corn with cellulose products as the primary source of ethanol will prevent a massive worldwide food shortage looming in the not too distant future)