Locavores' Dine on Regional Chow

Nov 21 16:24 UTC 2006

02:00 AM Nov, 21, 2006

Paul Adams, Wired News

The first thing I did when my friends invited me to their seasonal potluck
was pull out a map and a sharp compass.

My friends, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, are exemplary hosts, and the
potlucks they've thrown once a season are pretty casual affairs with just one
constraint: Every ingredient of every dish must have been grown and processed
within a 100-mile radius of their house in Brooklyn, New York.

That means not just no flour or oil, but no beer (plenty's brewed locally,
but the barley and hops come from outside the radius), no cinnamon and no
coffee.

I wanted to bring my favorite apple-buttermilk cobbler, but sugar was well
outside the boundaries. Maple syrup might make a good substitute, but I
couldn't find any in a week's hunting. Finally I abandoned the dessert idea
and decided to go with a nice, hearty beef stew.

Hundreds of "locavores" scattered around the country are celebrating
Thanksgiving this year with their own 100-mile meals.

Local, sustainable eating is a noble cause. As advocates like Alice Waters
and Michael Pollan have labored to make clear, it's good for both eater and
eaten, not to mention the economy and the planet. The 100-mile diet is perhaps
the quickest and cleverest way to build awareness of food miles, and the
pleasures and challenges of local "foodsheds." In just one traditional
Thanksgiving dessert, easily assembled at any supermarket, pecans from Georgia
fill a pie shell made with Oregon wheat and Wisconsin butter, with corn syrup
from Iowa, sugar from Florida, bourbon from Kentucky. If you're eating it in
New York, that adds up to some 6,000 miles for one pie -- 14,000 if you splash
in some Madagascar vanilla.

Your 100 Miles 
You won't find a "100-mile" section in your supermarket -- yet -- but here
are some starting points for those who want to go local.

First, find your 100-mile radius at http://100milediet.org/map/ -- it'll
give you a sense of what's included and what isn't. (The mapping feature only
works in the United States and Canada.)

Eat Well Guide has a tool that can generate a list of farms and stores in your
area offering local goods. The lists are incomplete and quite meat-heavy, but
full of finds nonetheless. FoodRoutes offers a similar tool.

Eat Local Challenge offers tips on every aspect of eating local, from general
philosophical issues to area-specific strategies and events. There may well
be an organized movement near you -- Vermont, San Francisco and New York state
have their own.

Word of mouth turns out to be the best way to find both ingredients and ideas.
At New York's Greenmarket, I learned all about the beef I bought, picked up
some local popcorn and even met a man who has a tiny coffee bush thriving on
his property upstate.

The idea was popularized by Gary Paul Nabhan in his 2001 book, Coming Home
to Eat, a description of his yearlong project to eat nothing from outside a
250-mile radius of his Arizona home. In his book, Nabhan waxes perfervid about
the joys of wolfberry salad and rattlesnake fritters.

Other locavores, like Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon, have tightened the
radius and softened the rhetoric: As documented on 100-Mile Diet and in their
forthcoming book, the couple ate within 100 miles of their Vancouver, British
Columbia, home for a year starting in March 2005, and remain active advocates
of local eating. A San Francisco Bay Area group put together an "Eat Local
Challenge" in August 2005, and the blog they started has become a community
and clearinghouse for local-minded eaters around North America.

Personally, I find local products more eye-openingly delicious than their
factory-farmed counterparts, but 100-mile cooking appeals most to the
puzzle-solver in me. Improvising a meal under such tight strictures reminds
me of the constrained literary projects of Oulipo, under whose auspices, for
instance, Georges Perec wrote his novel La Disparition without the letter "e."
My host Matt, by no coincidence, has a similar bent: His 2005 book, Exercises
in Style, tells the same comic-strip story in 99 different styles.

In the same way, 100-mile cooks are forced to come up with creative solutions
to the hurdles they encounter. With nutmeg and allspice forbidden,
ethnobotanist Leda Meredith spices her pumpkin puree with spicebush berries
and peppergrass seeds; MacKinnon replaces coconut with taste-alike green
hazelnuts, and sprinkles dried kelp in place of salt.

I usually flavor my beef stew with a magical triad of wine, beer and coffee,
but beer and coffee were off-limits, so I had to substitute a thinner New York
state wine for the hearty Californians I prefer. I would ordinarily dredge
the beef in flour before browning it, and add prunes at the beginning and
mustard at the end, but all of that went by the board. Nonetheless, with local
pasture-fed beef, carrots, potatoes, parsnips, turnips and pearl onions, the
stew turned out to be a hit.

Matt mixed cocktails with pear brandy, Jessica cooked a souffl and a buttery
potato galette and Bryan capped off the dinner with a pear-chestnut ravioli
dessert.

With the ground frozen, winter's meal is going to be tougher, but I embrace
the noble challenge. I'm already planning a February fishing trip.

response 2 of 3:

Nov 21 17:59 UTC 2006

On our tour of Jiffy's Chelsea plant, they told us they buy ingredients from
Ohio (I think it was the corn).  You can phone and ask them if they use
Michigan beet sugar or imported cane sugar.  I don't know of anyone selling
milk within 100 miles, but you can get local eggs.  The Farmer's Market is
supposed to sell only locally grown food and still has potatoes, onions,
squash, cabbages, cauliflower, apples, pears, carrots, maybe also beets and
winter radishes and leeks.  We made local borscht.  Our chard is not yet
frozen, or kale.  Someone is selling greenhouse half-ripe red tomatoes.