Best Food Writing 2013

by Holly Hughes

  Local equals changing the system.

  Local and organic foods currently make up 3 percent of food consumption in America, so it’s highly unlikely that those of us who contribute to this small percentage with our purchases are, as political pundits like to say, moving the needle.

  You may feel good about your personal actions in a large and indifferent universe. You may salve your conscience in avoiding companies that you consider to be adding to the growing social ills that beset us as a nation. But this isn’t the same as altering the status quo.

  Local is fresher and better.

  Local is not inherently fresher, nor is it inherently better. And it isn’t even always the case that when it’s fresher, it’s better.

  I love Rappahannock oysters, and if a restaurant can truck them up from Virginia’s Northern Neck just hours after dredging them from the water, I consider that a treat. But I prefer British Columbia oysters, which, though presumably not as fresh—the air time alone is double that of a trip from the Northern Neck—are richer, sweeter, firmer, and more delicate.

  Now, local potatoes? Fantastic. They taste like an altogether different species from the trucked-in variety most of us grew up with. Local corn? Ditto. Local tomatoes? Sometimes. I haven’t had many local tomatoes that compare to the juicy sweetness of a Jersey beefsteak. Local chickens? From a free-range, hormone-free source like Polyface, absolutely (and if it’s a special occasion and I’m not inclined to linger over the pinch of forking over $20 for a roaster, all the more so). From a giant factory farm on the equally local Delmarva Peninsula? Not if I can help it. Local cheese? Rarely.

  Consider the Peach

  We ought to be talking about “perishability,” says Eric Ziebold, the chef at CityZen, a gastronome’s paradise in DC’s Mandarin Oriental hotel.

  For every piece of produce, Ziebold says, there’s a “window” of freshness. The window for a ripened peach, for instance, is within the first six hours after being picked. Here he waxes poetic, describing that first bite after pulling one straight from a tree—the texture exquisitely poised between soft and firm, a sweetness that’s almost floral, the juice exploding in your mouth and running down your arm. Over the next six hours, the peach begins to degrade. For his purposes, Ziebold says, a peach delivered to the restaurant within 18 hours of being picked is still usable—it might work in a purée or a sauce—though it will have already lost its purity. After 24 hours, it’s “pretty much a different piece of fruit entirely.”

  Ziebold is perhaps pickier than most farmers-market shoppers, and initially I’m tempted to dismiss his words as the obsessive talk of a man who’s fanatical about purity and quality. But it occurs to me that that mania to experience a piece of fruit at its ripe and beautiful peak is the reason so many food-loving urbanites flock to farmers markets in season—indeed, that promise is woven deep within the “local” pitch. Better, fresher. If you drop big money on a peach, isn’t it fair to expect that the peach—which presumably hasn’t had to be trucked great distances and has been harvested not by a mass-production outfit but by the more attentive and loving hands of the small farmer—would be exceptional?

  And yet how many farmers-market peaches have you tasted in this area that were worthy of that adjective? I’ve had many good ones, but I can’t remember the last time I had the ecstatic encounter Ziebold describes.

  There’s a good explanation for that, he says: “If you’re a farmer selling in DC, you don’t necessarily want to sell a peach that’s going to get used that instant. They know that you’re going to go back to the office, and they want to give you a little better window. So it’s not a tree-ripened peach you’re getting.”

  Closer to the source, he says, it’s likely to be a different story: “If you visit that farm and pick up a peach and you don’t use it in six hours, it’s crap. But if you do use it in six hours, it’s the best peach you’ve eaten in your life.”

  It never occurred to me that the quality of produce at the urban farmers market isn’t the same as the quality of produce at a rural farmers market.

  That’s one lesson. The other, deeper lesson involves stretching Ziebold’s point to its logical conclusion. If perishability is paramount, if tasting things at their freshest is what matters most, then visiting a farmers market isn’t the only way to ensure that outcome. In some instances, it might not even be the best way.

  “I could get something FedExed that’s potentially fresher than a farmers market,” Ziebold says.

  So can we all. The Internet has opened up sourcing possibilities previously available only to insiders—oysters from Brittany, salmon from Alaska, caviar from Russia.

  Of course, the carbon footprint is likely to be considerably higher. More to the point: The romance is clearly missing.

  The Literal Fruit of Our Privilege

  And romance is not nothing. It’s very definitely a something. Local couldn’t exist without it.

  The wish to connect local food to something larger, to fetishize it as an object of desire, underpins the farmers-market experience and enables its supporters to justify dropping 80 bucks on a single bag of groceries.

  Listen to Robb Duncan, who owns Dolcezza—the excellent gelato shops in Georgetown, Dupont Circle, Fairfax, and Bethesda—explain the appeal of going to the farmers market: “You eat this food and it’s delicious, and it makes you feel happy to meet this farmer named Zachariah, and he doesn’t put any pesticides in his produce, and you walk around as part of this beautiful, beautiful community of people.”

  This is the farmers market as embodiment of a surviving hippie aesthetic, and for many it’s a powerful inducement to spend, whether they came of age in the ‘60s or, like Duncan, merely wish they did.

  There’s also the market experience as ratifier of status, in which the notion of simplifying our lives is held out to the busy, scattered urbanite as a glimpse of a new good life and a $4 tomato becomes the literal fruit of our privilege.

  I ask Ann Yonkers—who, with Bernadine Prince, has run the area’s FreshFarm Markets since 1997—what, beyond the makings of a meal, she thinks her customers come to the markets to buy.

  Yonkers is as committed to the cause as anyone in Washington. When FreshFarm began in 1997, there were only about four farmers markets in the area; today there are ten FreshFarms alone. The nonprofit is among the finest purveyors of its kind in the country, with goods coming from 118 farmers and producers.

  Yonkers is justifiably proud of this growth and speaks with the tones of an evangelist who believes she has found a path to, if not enlightenment, then happiness. Again and again I’m struck, as we speak, by the way she invests a material good—a cheese, a leg of lamb, a squash—with the aura of the spiritual.

  Her customers, she says, aren’t just dropping their disposable income on what some might see as luxury items; they’re “participating in change.” In other words, shopping at a farmers market isn’t an upper-middle-class indulgence—or not just. It’s also a political act.

  I ask if she might share with me some of the ways people can participate in change.

  “You can participate in change just by what you eat and buy and who you give your money to,” she says. “People come to our markets and they feel empowered.”

  There’s also the matter, she says, of “change for yourself.”

  Change for yourself?

  “Discovering flavor. Just by virtue of how fresh [the products] are.” Not new flavors, Yonkers is quick to emphasize—the flavor of familiar things, like melons and potatoes. That these things actually have flavor and aren’t the bland, colorless specimens that generations of agribusiness have taught us to accept. “Eating all these different varieties”—like the many different kinds of tomatoes.

  Sampling tomato varieties equates with participating in change?

  “That’s a huge level of change,” she says. “The markets have brought back biodiversity, a lot of which was lost in the ‘50s. We’ve seen the whole return to grass-fed—and
all these reforms as a result of that. Farmers are raising heritage breeds and heirlooms.”

  I tell her that this particular change, while important agriculturally, seems to me something less than the spiritual change she spoke of when we began talking. I tell her that mostly what I’m hearing from her and others is the opportunity for personal discovery in tasting new foods and cooking differently, and how that personal discovery—valid and worthy in itself—is being framed as a profound social and political act, and thus marketed as something more than it is.

  Yonkers acknowledges that a strong sense of the spiritual “runs through the whole movement,” then makes an analogy to Catholicism, with its ritualistic consumption of the body of Christ via the Communion wafer. She stops short of saying that taking Communion is akin to shopping at a farmers market, but I gather that for her, and perhaps for her many customers, the experiences are aligned.

  “Food,” she says, “is holy.”

  There’s Truth, and Then There’s Truth

  You sit down at a restaurant and open the menu. There’s a note at the top: “Proud to support our farmers.” Near the bar, you find a chalkboard with the names of all the farms whose products presumably contributed to your meal. The waiter announces the day’s specials, noting not only every ingredient for every dish but also the source for that ingredient, as if you just spent the weekend at Path Valley or Toigo Orchards or any of the other farms that are standbys of the restaurant scene. As if you’re on intimate terms with the workers who till the soil and plow the fields.

  You’re not simply supporting the restaurant, you’re made to feel; you’re supporting a community, an economy, a way of life. You’re feeling good: about dinner, about the restaurant, about yourself—hell, maybe even about the world and your place in it.

  And why wouldn’t you?

  Hearing and reading these paeans to local farmers, you’d assume that most of the raw materials that come through those kitchen doors are local, wouldn’t you? Perhaps not everything—salt and pepper, for instance, aren’t local. But a lot. Three-quarters of all the products, say. Or more than half.

  You’re assuming too much.

  For most restaurants, the answer is around 30 percent. That figure tends to be higher in the warmer months and lower in the colder ones. “In the summertime, 40 to 50 percent maybe,” Tom Meyer of Clyde’s Restaurant Group says.

  Maybe.

  Touting a connection to the land and saluting “our” farmers seems a dubious practice when only a third of all the products are from local purveyors. I don’t doubt that, from the restaurant’s perspective, the 30 percent is more meaningful than the other 70 percent because it took time and effort to procure. All products aren’t equal. But if local is something to support, something that matters, shouldn’t it matter for the other 70 percent?

  One restaurateur says that neither he nor any of his peers is buying items like onions and carrots and celery from local sources. They’re making their investment, he says, in “corn and tomatoes—things that make a difference.”

  A cynic might say: things that get noticed.

  Another restaurateur, a man deeply committed to local, confesses that while he sources regularly from more than a dozen purveyors, the milk and cream in his area restaurants aren’t local.

  Milk and cream? Shouldn’t those be the least we can assume comes from nearby farms?

  He’d much rather serve locally produced milk and cream in his restaurants, he says, but can’t find a consistent source to meet the volume he needs—a problem many restaurateurs also allude to. One local dairy delivery company adheres to such a strict radius that it won’t permit its trucks to go a few extra miles to make a drop-off at one of his restaurants.

  The channels of distribution for local farmers aren’t well developed, in marked contrast to the enormously efficient networks that bring food to supermarkets and chain restaurants. Products that might meet a particular need, at a volume that makes them attractive to chefs, aren’t always getting to the restaurants that want them.

  These are real concerns and ought not to be minimized. Local requires more work, more thought, and more investment.

  At the same time, when you’ve embraced an ideology that revolves around notions of purity and piety, no one wants to hear about the obstacles that prevent you from being more holy. Excuses will be construed as weakness. You open yourself to charges of hypocrisy if you’re anything less than completely faithful in your adherence.

  Or, at the very least, to charges of hype.

  The fact that distribution is lacking is real. So is the fact that it’s possible to source minimally from local farmers and still fly the flag of local.

  Lying with Local

  Elaine Boland possesses the flinty skepticism of many small farmers accustomed to selling their hard-earned products to urbanites. To talk to her for any length of time is to hear a woman who has grown weary of interactions with people who don’t grasp the rhythms of the seasons and the exigencies of life lived close to the land.

  She says she “rededicated” her company, Fields of Athenry, in Purcellville, to these older, elemental values after her daughter was diagnosed with Cushing’s syndrome, which results from exposure to high levels of the hormone cortisol. Two holistic doctors suggested she try a nutrient-rich diet. The diet helped, and Boland was moved to rethink her operation. If eating high-quality, humanely kept animals could save her daughter, it might save many other lives by preventing those ailments from occurring in the first place. Boland asks if I’ve ever eaten her meats. I say I have, twice—a lamb shoulder at Vermilion, in Old Town, and a lamb sausage at Haute Dogs & Fries, in Purcellville.

  “‘Cause I won’t sell to most chefs,” she says.

  Why is that?

  Boland goes silent and tells me she fears she’d get in trouble if she spoke her mind. Then, having resolved her inner contradiction, she sighs and says, “A lot of ‘em, they buy just enough to use your name on their menu. I don’t want somebody ordering two or three chickens off of me and a couple of chuck roasts and putting my name on their menu. When they’re probably running 300, 400 dinners a week? You have to be supplementing it with someone else.”

  I ask how she decides whom she’ll sell to and whom she won’t.

  She laughs ruefully. “I had to learn. I had to learn who was honest and dedicated to this. I learned the hard way.”

  Today, if a chef expresses interest in featuring her meats, she invites him or her out to the farm along with the kitchen staff. What would appear to be an innocuous meet-and-greet is, in fact, a rigorous screening process, a way for Boland to assess a chef’s “level of engagement in talking about whole animal, head to hoof, their love of organ meats, their interest in buying whole animals. There are very few chefs who do that, buy the whole animal. Very few can make the off-product sell, because they really can cook. They’ll say to me, ‘We don’t have to stick to a set menu. We’ll figure out how to use the product—don’t worry.’”

  The screening helps her figure out who is interested in a legitimate relationship, with its give-and-take and dependency, and who is merely interested in taking on a new supplier—or worse, acquiring a bit of fashionable window dressing.

  “I don’t want to be used,” she says, sounding like a twice-jilted lover.

  Deep Throat Speaks

  A trusted source within the industry, a man I’ve come to refer to as Deep Throat for the reliable gossip he feeds me, said the practice that Elaine Boland describes is “more common than you think,” adding: “Truth in advertising is one of the biggest issues with this.”

  Every one of the insiders I spoke with talked about local as doing the right thing, citing its importance for our bodies, our land, our communities, our economies, our farmers. But over the months, I came to distinguish among them as I listened.

  Here, for instance, are my notes from a conversation with a young, locally minded restaurateur with a small chain of restaurants:

  “It�
�s always been a big part of our mission and strategy, and it’s really exciting to see it start to become a standard in the food space.

  “Putting the farmers’ names on that board like we do. It’s all about transparency.

  “We shouldn’t get so obsessed with the stricter definitions. That’s not the über thing.

  “That’s what it’s all about for us—emotional connection. When our customers see a picture of a farmer and they learn that story. It’s about making people feel good about their decision at every touch point.”

  Now listen to Spike Gjerde, chef and owner of Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore.

  Asked to define “local,” he says the word is the basis “for asking some very important questions.” Namely: “What are the farmer’s practices and what are the impacts on the environment of those practices?”

  Gjerde often laments the years he missed in the cause. “I’m 20 years late to this,” he says. I hear something of Alice Waters’s ethos in his words, particularly when he says that it’s not enough to “serve something good.”

  The “aim of all this,” he says, “should be to connect the diner to something larger”—in his case, an appreciation of the Chesapeake, “our Yellowstone, our national treasure.” But more broadly, an understanding of where our food is grown and by whom, and a curiosity about how our choices—our dollars—affect the system. “At Woodberry,” he says, “we use the restaurant to sell the local products. Conversely, a lot of restaurants are using local to sell the restaurant.”

  It’s not Gjerde’s fidelity to a high-church standard of purity that impresses me. It’s his understanding of the idea that dinner at a restaurant is a complex interplay of many people, only one of whom is the chef. And that a restaurant has a responsibility to the larger culture.

  Perhaps this is why Gjerde doesn’t exult over what he has accomplished but continues to torture himself with how he should be doing so much more.

  I tell him this sounds like a definition for neuroticism.

  Gjerde laughs. “I don’t see how you can be engaged in this thing and not be like that.”