Eating Local: The Farm to Table Movement
July 29, 2008
by Suzanne Martinson
Here a locavore, there a locavore, everywhere a locavore.
A locavore - the word of the year in the New Oxford American Dictionary – is someone who seeks locally produced food.
Their numbers here are sprouting.
Farmers markets in the region have been growing in size and numbers the past several years. And in Longview, a new group has taken farm fresh to a new plateau as it helps locavores connect with the farm fresh food they crave.
The year-old collaborative called Lower Columbia Farm is spearheaded by Joan LeMieux, who leads the group of volunteers that works to bring locally grown food to the family table. Like a garden rake, Farm to Table has a multi-pronged approach. The dozen or so people in Farm to Table, including farmers, nutritionists, gardeners and just plain food-lovers, have found fertile ground in the region for their return-to-roots movement.
Farm to Table’s approach is not so much about planting, but nourishing the many good seeds already growing here. Besides helping people find good food to cook, the group also sponsors dinners prepared by a local chef that entice the taste buds while giving diners a chance to meet the local farmers who grow their food.
LeMieux, a former schoolteacher, hospital administrator and Cowlitz County commissioner, said women have long taken responsibility for the food that feeds families and fuels communities. “The griddle is hot,” she said. “Fifteen years ago, this wouldn’t have worked.”
The organizer said she’s not out to incite political changes a la filmmaker Michael Moore, but to encourage small changes on the way to eating well. Few people have the resources or the will to adapt the all-or-nothing approach in author Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life,” she said, but even growing a pot of tomatoes on the deck can be a start.
The group stays close to the ground. Some people interested in Farm to Table are serving on the advisory committee for the Longview Community Gardens, working with Rich Beam, director of Longview Parks and Recreation. With the help of green-thumb mentors, the group hopes to draw new families into the fertile fold of growing what they eat and fill all 76 of the 20-by-40-foot plots, where Longview residents have been planting vegetables for more than 20 years.
Dixie Edwards, who with her husband, Scott, operates a nursery and garden just outside the Longview city limits, is a pivotal member of Farm to Table. They sell organically grown fruits and vegetables and eggs from pastured chickens.
“I only started for myself,” she said. “I want my family to have fresh, pesticide-free food.”
Farm fresh to me has special meaning.
I was reared on a Midwest farm that has been in my family for more than 110 years. After college, I moved to the city, relocated to the South, worked in the East, and ended up here with my husband, Bob. Wherever we roamed, I toted my memory of farm food along — and found that the old has become new again.
Today’s buzzword swirling around farming is sustainability. Dad called it conservation. To us, raising crops organically meant spreading cow manure in the fields. The globalization of agriculture was selling our wheat to Russia when the Soviet Union’s crop was destroyed by drought, or being able to buy bananas all year round.
Eating seasonally was enjoying corn on the cob twice a day until the last ear of sweet corn was picked. Seasonal thinking was Mother’s directive to “Go out to the garden and pick a quart of berries for supper.” When the berries reached their peak, we made strawberry jam. We dug potatoes for the winter, and stored them under the basement stairway. At Gram and Gramp’s farmhouse next door, apples from their orchard were stored in the cool of their root cellar. We bought our Thanksgiving turkey from a neighbor, and my aunt spent all day plucking every pinfeather off the bird for our family feast. For Christmas Eve, we made homemade ice cream with milk from our Golden Guernsey cows.
We never went hungry, but choices were limited in the off-season. You didn’t find red raspberries in the grocery store in February, and pineapple came in cans. Today’s families eat whatever they want whenever they want – as long as they can pay the price. Food is shipped in from continents and oceans away, and at the supermarket “in season” has become “always available.”
Yet few children have the fun of taking a break in play to run out to the garden, pull a carrot out of the ground, hold it under the hose and eat it right down to its green top. Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter never had it so good.
Trends may come and go, but for us farm girls one thing has not changed. Farm fresh is still farm fresh.
The farmers market is the most visible link in the Farm to Table movement.
The Kelso-Longview area has three farmers markets within the city limits of the two towns and a fourth is across the Columbia River in Rainier, Ore. The largest of the four is the Community Farmers Market of Cowlitz County, which is located at the county fairgrounds.
Last summer the bustling market had its best year ever, according to Dolly Hartzell, who writes the market’s online newsletter. Dolly farms with husband Scott on Puget Island. At their Kathleen’s Animal Protein, the family produces pastured-raised chickens, eggs, pork and turkeys.
“The best thing about selling at the farmers market is developing a personal relationship between the farmers and the customer,” Dolly said. “That’s why we love doing that.”
Many would agree. In Washington State, the number of farmers markets has increased to 127 from the 14 reported by the Washington Farmers Market Association in 1978. Oregon now has 11 markets on the coast alone. The burgeoning growth is part of a nationwide trend. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there were 4,385 markets in 2006, the latest year for which statistics are available. This was up 18.3 percent from 2004. Farmers markets on the Northwest Coast are among those making their culinary mark. (See accompanying listing.)
Fans of farmers markets seem more in tune with the seasons, and better understand the proclivities of nature in the too much rain-too little rain Northwest. Many develop a feeling of trust looking in the eyes of the man or woman who grew their berries or their beef.
Taking a page from Wahkiakum County’s beautiful brochure listing Puget Island, Skamokawa and Grays River farms, the newly minted Farm to Table volunteers gathered additional information to publish a three-county guide to individual farms last summer. The guide provided information so consumers could visit a farm and pick fruits, buy vegetables, or purchase meat, poultry and eggs in Cowlitz and Wahkiakum counties in Washington and Columbia Country, Ore.
The 1,000 copies of the free color brochure, which featured a map to the farms, were distributed throughout Chambers of Commerce, libraries, hospitals, The Longview Daily News, and the Washington State University Extension offices. A second guide is planned for this summer. The group hopes to eventually have the information on an Internet site.
High-quality, just-picked produce satisfies hunger while tickling the senses – something that over-packaged, preservative-rich meals try to do with lots of high-fructose corn syrup and trans fats. But what of the person who has never cut into a ripened-on-the-vine local tomato in August, or doesn’t know that a ripe strawberry is red all the way through? A truly wonderful meal can be a turning point.
Working with the Lower Columbia Farm to Table, Chef Bryan Burt of CFD Café in downtown Longview cooked several seasonal dinners last year based on products available locally, including leafy greens, berries, tomatoes, homestead cheeses and lamb. He also created recipes using Oregon beef raised without hormones or antibiotics.
Because farm fresh foods have so much natural flavor, Burt said it’s best to keep “the dishes simple.”
The Farm to Table dinner patrons learned to expect the unexpected. Tomato cobbler isn’t on many dessert menus, but pleased murmurs worked their way around the room when the delectable dish was served. Burt said customers especially enjoyed meeting the farmers who grew their food.
“People love the idea of less travel time for food,” said Burt, who studied at Western Culinary Institute in Portland. Though finding the local goods can sometimes be challenging, he said, “it’s the best way to go.”
The good taste of local has made its way into fast food, too. Burgerville, a Vancouver-based chain, serves strawberry shakes when the local berries come into season and also features Walla Walla onion rings. Burgers are made from Oregon-grown beef. A U-turn is a necessity when the sign for Oregon hazelnut chocolate shakes go up, or when thoughts turn to Tillamook cheese melting onto a sandwich.
Farm to Table is in good company. We retired to the Pacific Northwest after two decades in Pittsburgh, which had a thriving chapter of a chartered, international organization called Slow Food. Slow Food-Pittsburgh sponsored a series of meals that featured everything from heritage turkeys to organically grown sweet corn. The group dined in restaurants, a community center – and even a barn.
Slow Food was organized in Italy after the first McDonald’s opened there, and the Italians began to worry that their country’s food traditions might be devoured by American-style fast food restaurants. The Slow Food emphasis is on cooking and serving food that feeds the soul as well as the body.
Farm to Table dinners extend that satisfying idea by emphasizing local food. Other activities included a free film series on the pressures that threaten the American food supply.
As the Lower Columbia region turned its taste buds on to local foods, the question arose: just what constitutes local? It may be food grown within 50 miles of the farmers market, or a day’s drive away in Eastern Oregon or Washington. “Local” pumpkins may come from your neighbor’s backyard garden, though it takes a Walla Walla farmer to grow a “Walla Walla sweet” – what industry wags call the “designer onions.”
The term local is relative. The plain fact is you can’t grow everything everywhere. It’s infinitely easier to grow a “Hermiston melon” in northeastern Oregon than in our shady back yard. In fact, when my husband and I married and moved to a log house in the rural Rainier hills, co-workers inquired what we’d planted in our garden. “Lettuce,” we said and went on to add a grocery list of vegetables. When we ended with “… and watermelon,” everybody laughed. Poor soil, too much elevation, too short a growing season. We should have stuck with zucchini.
Farm to Table member Dixie Edwards and husband Scott don’t have that knowledge gap. The couple specializes in growing plants native to the Northwest, including more than a hundred species of ornamentals, vegetables and fruits on their six acres off Ocean Beach Highway.
Scott said you may call him an urban farmer, gardener or horticulturist. “I’m a plant person,” he said. One who went organic before it was popular, said his wife.
A WSU Master Gardener, Dixie took me on a tour of the greenhouses, orchards and plantings on their farm, Watershed Garden Works. A former preschool and sixth-grade teacher and the daughter of educators, she gardens organically, although she hasn’t sought government certification because of the high costs involved.
Her organic methods include the flock of perhaps 40 hens that roam the place. “The ‘girls’ are our first line of defense against insects and slugs,” she said. “We used to have lots of slugs before we got chickens.”
Deer are a bigger problem. Most mornings they drop by the farm. “They look down one row, then another,” Dixie said. “They consider our crops their personal smorgasbord.”
Staying in tune with Mother Nature does have its pitfalls. As we turned the corner along the back border of their place, she pointed to some paw prints in the rich mud — silt clay loam, which Dixie described as a “Class A soil that will grow anything.”
The tracks? “Probably a possum.”
Although there is a family of hawks on nearby Mount Solo, opossums and raccoons are the biggest threat to the chickens, who were happily pecking and scratching and climbing a hill of potting soil as they anticipated the sound of their feed bucket filling up. When night falls, they head for the indoor laying boxes where they roost and deposit their eggs.
Dixie said her hens can live to a ripe old age of seven (factory layers seldom see their first birthday). The black Australot, which lay brown eggs, have turned out to be her best egg producers, though she also keeps a few Anconas, the breed that lays the pale-colored, so-called “Easter eggs,” as well as the perky Bantam hens of my own childhood.
Are these frolicking fowl what chefs refer to as “free-range’?
Joked Scott: “Free range. Pastured. All over, every which place.”
When I made my early spring visit, Dixie and I walked past the neat rows of garlic peeping through the soil. She has tried more than 40 varieties of the pungent seasoning. Planted in the fall, garlic “will be gone by the Equinox – June 21,” she said.
But other crops, from green beans to grapes to figs, take their place, and people will come to the farm to experience the good taste of fresh food. Artichokes and cabbages are two favorites.
Scott said he hoped a new generation will become interested in farming. Lower Columbia Farm to Table is counting on it.
Here a chick, there a chick, everywhere a chick-chick.
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