Supporting local food initiatives is a necessary trend

Supporting local food initiatives is a necessary trend

Supporting local foods is a trend at which comedians often poke fun.  The series Portlandia created a hipster couple so interested in the chicken dinner’s upbringing they had to move onto the cultish farm to learn about the bird’s heritage. 

All joking aside, supporting local foods is a trendy thing to do, but is also increasingly important.  With the influence of mega-farms, corporatized food production and the obesity epidemic, buying local food gives consumers a degree of control over what they eat impossible with other options.  Threatened by all of the alternatives, local farmers and restaurateurs need all the support they can get.  But supporters of local foods benefit, too; they get to see what goes into their food, notice an improvement in their health and teach their children that the hot dog is not a type of farm animal. 

Here are some of the progressions of local food this year:

Community Supported Agriculture:  For this local produce, families or groups of people sign up to have a box full of local and seasonal produced, usually vegetables and fruit, delivered directly to them a few times each year.  A farmer offers a share to the public and then consumers buy a membership or subscription to receive the goods so many times per year.  Started over twenty years ago, today, more than 4,000 farms in the United States participate in the CSA program.

Pop-up restaurants:  These restaurants use temporary spaces—vacant restaurants, unused businesses, public parks—as short-time restaurants.  Proprietors usually buy local produce and create a small number of products or products to sell.  Once that product is sold out, they close up shop forever.  This style of restaurant also gives chefs without the means or the time to set up shop at a permanent restaurant a chance to showcase their skills.  For example, a group of Italian grandmothers on Staten Island make only one dish everyday at their pop-up Enoteca Maria restaurant and once it’s sold-out, that’s it until tomorrow.  Another example of a pop-up is What Happens When, a pop-up restaurant in Manhattan that will be open for nine-months and will cycle through four scene changes.  The first cycle included potato skins with wheat beer fondue and pickled sausage and the second was made up of venison tartar and celery root with truffles.

Farmers’ markets:  Farmers’ markets used to be more of expectance than the  luxury that they seem to be today, but hopefully some of that is changing with the implementation of food stamps at many farmers’ markets around the country.  Farmers’ markets are a worldwide staple—there are street markets in Asia and mercados in Peru—and they allow farmers to sell their crops directly to the public without a middleman.  Although you can’t really call such an ancient market a “trend,” a direct connection between producer and consumer gives the people at both ends much needed piece of mind.  One of the earliest farmers’ market, Los Angeles’ Farmers Market, is still going strong, nearly 80 years after its inception in 1934.  The farmers put their produce on the backs of their pickups in a dirt parking lot and consumers could buy the food directly from them.  Nothing much has changed since the 1930’s in this arena and we are all the better because of it.