Locally Grown Food

Get It Here
As the local-foods movement gathers steam in Baltimore, is there enough product
available to make it last?

    Do not expect to get tomato on your sandwich in January at Dogwood Deli. The Hampden eatery, along with its companion restaurant, The Dogwood, is committed to buying and using only locally sourced produce and meats whenever possible (and organic when available), which means that if it ain’t growing in Maryland, it ain’t going on the plate. Hence, there are no bland, artificially reddened tomatoes on sandwiches and salads in the middle of winter.
    “Once we’re in season in the summer, it’s easy,” says Galen Sampson, owner of Dogwood. “Winter, you sort of scramble and make do with what you find.”
    Making do with what you can find on the farms surrounding you has become something of new food trend. New restaurants—including Dogwood, as well as the soon-to-open Woodberry Kitchen and Easton’s Restaurant Local—are trumpeting their dedication to local ingredients. Grocery chains like Wegmans and Whole Foods stock them on their shelves, college cafeterias (including Goucher College’s) are joining farm-to-college programs, and even WIC has food coupons that can be used at farmer’s markets.
    The numbers are impressive: A 2007 survey conducted by the University of Baltimore Schaefer Center for Public Policy found that 76 percent of Marylanders said they were more likely to buy produce identified as grown in the state, up from 57 percent increase from 2006.
    “It feels like we’re at a tipping point,” says Janna Howley, co-chair of the Chesapeake Sustainable Business Alliance (CSBA) and an organizer of a regional “Buy Fresh, Buy Local” campaign, “where people are starting to realize that local food is not only about great flavor, but is directly related to the health of our families, our communities, and our planet.”
    Not everyone’s motives are quite so idealistic. “Selfishly, if you are looking for the best tasting food, it’s right in your backyard,” says Sampson. “Something that you’re getting shipped from thousands of miles away is not going to have the same taste, quality, and texture as something that was picked 30 miles away and shipped within a week.”
    For someone like Sampson, who received his culinary training under European chefs, eating what the area provides and what’s in season is second nature and common sense.
But in the U.S.—despite having been an agrarian powerhouse for centuries—we’re not as attached to our food heritage as our European counterparts are. Our grocery stores stock New Zealand lamb, Mexican strawberries, California tomatoes. In fact, according to the nonprofit organization FoodRoutes, most food in U.S. grocery stores travels about 1,300 miles to get to one’s table. Because those products must be industrially harvested and spend weeks in transit, the varieties are chosen for their durability, not their flavor. The result is that America’s supermarket produce aisles have less variety and less taste.
    These concerns are not new. Warren Belasco, a professor of American Studies at UMBC, explains that there’s always been a fascination in America with the idealized small farmer and with the self-sufficiency of living off the land. A lot of today’s advocates were born out of the food movements of the 60’s and 70’s, when agrarian idealism and organic experimentation became popular. (Think of Alice Waters, creator of Berkeley’s famously farm-centric Chez Panisse.)
    Today, Belasco sees two main drivers behind the current trend. One is the price of gas, which affects transport costs as well as the growing patterns of farmers. But perhaps the most important motivator is what he describes as “disgust.”
    “Self-interest in terms of health—that fear of being poisoned—is a good motivator,” Belasco says. Although he notes that small farmers can make mistakes just like a corporate farm can, he says there is a perceived accountability in knowing the farmer supplying the food.
    First there was mad cow. Then E.coli showed up in spinach. Then there was salmonella in peanut butter. Finally, there was melamine (a chemical used to make plastic) in pet food. According to Howley, taste and safety are all fueling the momentum of the movement.
    “The food scares over the past several years have made people think about where their food comes from and wanting to have more traceability,” she says.
    There’s also a more psychological sense of comfort involved in knowing who grew or raised your food. Shoppers like knowing that their money is staying in the local economy, helping a farmer they know by name as well as local suppliers and transit workers they may never meet but who are in the local area. According to Howley, this sense of community building is integral to the locally produced movement.
    “I’d rather go to some place like Mill Valley Garden Center and buy plants than Home Depot,” says Howley. “And at Mill Valley, I can ask the owner a thousand questions and she’ll take the time to answer them. You develop a relationship. People are looking for that sense of community.”
    Mill Valley Garden Center and Farmer’s Market sits half-hidden below street level in Remington and can be distinguished from the surrounding brick-and-mortar landscape by the vibrant streaks of color from the flats of flowers outside. The store takes the locally grown concept to a whole new level – the plants (herbs, vegetables, perennials, and annuals) are locally grown; the pots are local or come from fair trade, child-labor-free importers; the market carries coffee from area roaster Zeke’s Coffee, soaps by Erbal Body Worx, Whiskey Island Pirate Shop’s spicy condiments, local produce from One Straw Farm and Tuscarora Organic Grower’s Cooperative, and dairy products from Trickling Springs Creamery. Everything from the honey to the sausage comes from the Chesapeake Bay watershed area.
    Ironically, Cheryl Wade, who co-owns Mill Valley with Dave Aronson, started her career in conventional supermarkets. When she started in the business 30 years ago, produce departments were seasonal; although bananas were a year-round fixture, there was no asparagus until spring, no raspberries until summer. She watched the industry change from one determined by the seasons to an agri-business where food standards plummeted and inspections became more lenient.
    Mill Valley is the anti-supermarket. “Is it better for your body and the world in general to buy a certified organic frozen leg of lamb from New Zealand that’s trucked across that country, put on a ship or plane to California, where it is trucked all the way across the United States to be sold in the supermarket?” Wade questions. “Or is the all-around better thing to buy a leg of lamb from South Mountain Creamery in Western Maryland that follows natural processes in the raising of the lamb?”
    Wade says some of her customers become nostalgic during their first visit to the store. “They say, ‘Oh, that’s how it used to be, that’s how we ate growing up,’” says Wade, who herself was raised on produce grown by her family in Rock Hall. “Everything old is new again.”

    But buying local has its downsides. First, it isn’t easy. Local farmers wrestle with issues of distribution and seasonality. “You can’t just pick up the phone and call a huge distributor,” says Sampson. “I call One Straw Farm to place my order then I pick it up on Saturday at the farmer’s market and I build the menu around what’s available. You have to work to do this.”
Second, American consumers are spoiled. They are accustomed to getting what they want, when they want it—even if it tastes like cardboard.
    “People show up in January and ask for strawberries,” says Wade with a sad laugh. “When we say we only sell local produce, they still ask why we don’t have strawberries. People have gotten so far removed from where their food comes from and the impact it has on the environment.”
    At Atwater’s Belvedere Square lunch counter, owner Ned Atwater feels Wade’s pain. “We do asparagus soup every day in the spring,” he says. “Inevitably someone comes in in July and wants to know why there’s no asparagus soup. I try to direct them to something that’s in season, like tomato or zucchini.” Many restaurateurs find themselves turning to old ways, such as freezing seasonal berries or canning fruits, to preserve the spring and summer abundance.
    It’s also possible that demand will outstrip supply. While more people are turning to local farmers, those same farmers are going out of business across the state (and country). Land is expensive and there’s not much of it; farming is hard, not extremely lucrative, work. As a result, there simply aren’t enough local products to fill every store. As one restaurateur pointed out, “There aren’t enough crabs in the Chesapeake Bay to supply the restaurants in Baltimore—so what are you going to do? Not serve crabs?”

    In some ways, local producers have become victims of their own popularity. When David Smith began Springfield Farm in Sparks, he did so to try to preserve a piece of farmland that was in his family for generations. He chose a niche that was not yet filled, the production (sometimes through cooperation with other farmers) of naturally raised meats and eggs. He hoped to take his product and knock on a few doors to see if restaurants would bite, but after selling eggs to Golden West, the restaurants were banging on his door. Gertrude’s, Charleston, The Oregon Grille—all helped Springfield Farm to explode. Smith now does business with 25 restaurants and markets, in addition to the individuals who flock—no pun intended—to Smith’s garage to buy meat, poultry, and eggs.
    “The demand for local is almost overwhelming – I don’t think a month goes by we don’t get a call from interested restaurants,” says Smith, who’s been in business eight years. “There’s a balance between producing more and staying small enough to keep the quality. Currently we’re trying to figure out how to meet the demand, and whether, as small farmers, we want to even try. The problem with getting too big is you lose touch with what’s going on and become a manager instead of a farmer.”
    While Smith’s production of 15,000 fresh chickens a year may sound astounding to someone who’s never thrown feed in a henhouse, it’s pinfeathers when you realize a farmer producing for Perdue may be running through 60,000 chickens a week. “It’s a lot of chickens for us, but it’s a drop in the bucket,” says Smith.
    To meet demand, the definition of “local” in this area has expanded to include Virginia, Pennsylvania, and other surrounding areas, perhaps within a 200-mile radius. The hope is to create a self-perpetuating success story, where more people seek out local products, more would-be farmers take the plunge into the soil, and more small farms succeed, thereby putting more local products on shelves.
    Another downside to buying locally is that, ironically, it’s a longer drive to get to a Sparks farm than to the supermarket down the street. One way around this is CSA (community supported agriculture) programs at farms like One Straw and Calvert’s Gift in Sparks. For a fixed fee, members buy a growing-season’s worth of produce (and sometimes eggs or other extras). Each week the individual gets a box of whatever is growing at that time. Some, though not all, CSAs deliver to central locations.
    Then there’s the money issue. Unlike large-scale industrial farms, small family farms are not propped up by government subsidies, cheap labor, or industrial harvesting methods. Smith, whose ground beef is about $4.50 a pound (a local grocery was selling brand-name ground beef for $3.39), calls it “the true price” of food, with no subsidies and no short cuts.
    “I tell people that good, healthy food costs money,” says Atwater, who struggles with balancing portion size, a fair price for customers, and a fair price to the local farmers he’s worked with for years. “Unfortunately, through the over-processing of food, we’ve been convinced that food can be cheap. . . . When [consumers] do their budget or think about what they buy with their money, be it clothes or an expensive car, they should consider food as a priority.”
    Many people do. And they aren’t just the yuppies shelling out big bucks for organic cheddar at Whole Foods. As traffic rumbles by on the Jones Falls Expressway overhead, patrons fill the Baltimore City farmer’s market. They are middle-aged couples carrying L.L. Bean tote bags stuffed with fresh bread, young mothers with babies on their hips pushing strollers overflowing with spring onions and potted herbs, and working-class folks filling recycled plastic shopping bags with fruits.
    Cindy Zimlin, 56, guesses she’s been coming to the market since it started in 1977. Although she left the city and now lives in Owings Mills, she comes to the market each Sunday at 8 a.m. An avid cook, she knows all the vendors and enjoys socializing while she shops. “I happen to love buying local because it supports the local economy and it tastes a lot better,” she says, shouldering a bag already brimming with asparagus, a basil plant, and a coconut cake.
    Leslie McCreary, 45, has her own reasons for coming to the market every other week from Woodlawn. “Lately, listening to the news with all the [food] problems, I’d rather buy locally grown,” she says. Already she’s bought spring onions, honey, potatoes, and plants. “The produce we get now ships from all over the country. Here I get it fresher and it tastes better.” She adds that because she is currently on dialysis, she likes the idea that these products may be healthier. And she finds the prices are competitive, if not less, than those at big chain stores.
    Our great-grandparents—heck, even some of our parents—ate foods that came from the region where they lived. But the way Americans eat changed. Whether the locally grown food movement can change the new American food consciousness requires a certain level of clairvoyance regarding many factors. Will the area be able to maintain affordable land prices? Will the Chesapeake Bay stay healthy enough to support fish and wildlife? Can producers keep their products competitively priced, even for the poor? Everything from the future of global warming or a fossil fuel crisis to the willingness of chefs, consumers, and large chain restaurants to get into the local product game could affect the ability of the movement to grow on a large scale.
    UMBC’s Belasco, who supports the local movement but is skeptical of its future growth potential, states that for the movement to work, it could require the “Europeanization” of America, where cars and houses are smaller and closer together and disposable income that now goes to expensive commutes and heating bills would be redirected into items like food.
    “There’s a reason our food travels a long distance and comes from industrial farms, and that’s because it’s cheaper,” says Belasco. “That’s the bargain we made long ago. As long as people want food to be cheap, [locally grown] is going to be a small but important niche.”