Baltimore Eats - Chesapeake Locavores Unite!

Chesapeake Locavores Unite!

Harvesting squash at One Straw Farm in Baltimore County

The word Locavore was concocted by a group from the San Francisco Bay area (Of course!) who launched an Eat Local Challenge out there in August 2005. Those folks who took the Challenge made a serious effort to only eat foods grown, raised and produced within a 100-mile radius from their home for a month.

Free range chickens enjoy cozy, clean nesting boxes at Springfield.

Now why would anyone even care to attempt such a thing? Actually there are a number of very good reasons:

Locally grown food is fresher, healthier and tastes lots better! Produce shipped from distant states and foreign countries can travel many thousands of miles and spent as much as two weeks in transit. To accommodate that, most of it is picked before it's ripened. Many green veggies, like lettuce, are "conditioned" to extend their shelf life and kill dangerous microorganisms. Some of that "conditioning" doesn't sound too yummy either - chlorinated water baths, ozone treatments, irradiation...

Even legally labeled organic produce can be picked before it's ripe and shipped great distances to market. Food produced on a smaller scale, by farmers and artisans who are literally your neighbors, is picked ripe, processed with fewer chemicals and less in need of genetic modification to ensure an unnaturally elongated shelf life.

Food from close to home means less trucks driving long distances -less dependence upon economically and politically expensive fossil fuels. -less global warming. Food sold in US supermarkets averages 1,500 miles from the farm to the shelf, according to the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington non-profit. Even certified organic products are increasingly grown on huge mono-cropped acreages or raised in intensive feedlot spreads, often overseas.

Buying local keeps your food dollars in your own community, helping smaller farmers to prosper. Farmers would certainly rather sell directly to you, than to a giant food conglomerate that can take half their profits and truck their products a few hundred miles away to a distributing or packing depot!

Locavores even insist that "local" often beats "organic." How can that be? Well, year-by-year, large corporations have been buying up smaller family farms and steadily chipping away at the US Department of Agriculture's Organic Standards, often weakening the requirements for the organic label or nudging the "definitions" in support of their interests.

You may be picturing a scene from your old nighttime storybooks (the Beatrice Potter farmer in his straw hat with hoe) whenever you spot that Organic label, but it ain't necessarily so... and let's face it, frozen organic broccoli spears will never taste as good as freshly picked stuff right from the farm!

The Buy Local movement is gathering strength with books like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, and Gary Paul Nabham's Coming Home To Eat, hitting the mainstream. Here in town, no less than the Baltimore Business Journal recently ran an article focused on area restaurants that are choosing to purchase from local providers. Happily, there are more than just a few who are doing so, but the chef or buyer making that commitment has a number of hurdles to leap. Of course it's easier to buy everything from one large supplier, have it all delivered on a certain day and be done with it. Buying specific or specialty products from small local operations often entails more phone calls on ordering day, scheduling and coordinating more deliveries or even going out yourself to pick up the products.

Then there's the issue, more difficult here then in northern California, of seasonal availability... Can the customer give up that slice of tasteless chemically ripened, washed-out tomato on their sandwich come January? Galen Sampson, from Baltimore's new Dogwood Deli on 36th Street in Hampden, is banking on it. Galen, who was the Executive Chef at the Harbor Court Hotel for nine years, and his wife Bridget, chose their Hampden location for its "Main Street - Home Town feeling."

At the Dogwood Deli in Hampden

"We believe sincerely in our mission to provide Baltimore with naturally inspired food that's fresh, healthy and grown close to home. I believe that people really do know the difference," he insists, "and we make it a talking point with our customers." Though working closely with local farmers takes extra effort, the Sampsons are convinced it's worthwhile.

"It's a give and take." Galen explains, "One day Joan Norman from One Straw Farm had a ton of peppers and needed to sell them. I took advantage of that, buying them at a very good price, and I'll preserve them... No, I may not have sliced tomatoes come January, but I'll have the most delicious tomato chutney, made from tomatoes picked and preserved at their height of taste."

Surely better on your sandwich than any mushy hot house tomato! In addition to weekly shopping at the local Farmers' Markets, Galen and Bridget buy from One Straw, Springfield, Calvert's Gift and Trickling Springs Farms, all less than an hour's drive away.

David Smith of Springfield Farm

Drew and Joan Norman's One Straw Farm, the largest certified organic produce supplier in the state, and David and Lilly Smith's Springfield Farm, which specializes in free-range poultry, are probably the two most successful local operations when it comes to managing restaurant wholesale accounts.

Springfield Farm, located in Sparks, in northern Baltimore County, has been in David Smith's family since the 1600's. Today three generations work the farm together, on 67 rolling acres that are dotted with bubbling springs and gurgling creeks. David practices sustainable agriculture methods, carefully rotating his flocks from one pasture ground to a fresh one at regular intervals.

He doesn't use antibiotics or hormones and all his products are processed under inspection -though David maintains that, "My customers are my most important inspectors!" Beef (grass-fed and natural), grass-fed lamb, pork and rabbit are also available through David.

At One Straw Farm, Drew and Joan Norman work 175 acres just south of the Pennsylvania line in White Hall. They wholesale to Wegmans and Whole Foods, as well as to local restaurants and other, smaller grocers.

Joan Norman checking on the bio-diesel conversion set-up at One Straw Farm.

This spring they set up a biodiesel conversion unit at the farm and they devote portions of their land to the Native Grassland Project, a program designed to help conserve habitat for species-at-risk in the state of Maryland. Drew says: "Sometimes you do something just because it's the right thing to do."

Both Springfield and One Straw are active in the American Institute of Wine and Food's "Days of Taste," an innovative program offered to local elementary schools. The AIWF is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to "enhancing the quality of life through education about what we eat and drink." Days of Taste teaches kids to appreciate fresh foods and demonstrates the connection between farm and table with field trips to One Straw and Springfield each spring and fall.

In a future issue we'll follow the 3rd graders from Roland Park Elementary as they take Joan Norman's tour of One Straw Farm. A new generation of young Locavores in the making?

We hope so!

-Bonnie North

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