Dining in all the fabulous restaurants in the big cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or San Francisco, you can find a wide array of themes. You can find facilities with Nuevo Latino, Italian, French, Dim Sum… classic themes like these, while some restaurants rock the latest trend, which could be whatever the Food Network has told America. With the somewhat recent release of Al Gore’s film The Inconvenient Truth, rising gas prices, and rocky economy, creative marketing has become a very sought after skill. Other informative and mind-opening media pieces such as Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me or Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma have caused the food industry to reevaluate the way food is sold. Corporate food chains display bright banners with words like ‘organic’ or ‘fresh’ embossed across the packaging that is ‘biodegradable.’ T.V. commercials or ads are bright and coupled with a kitschy soda-pop soundtrack to lure our unsuspecting youth.
Coming out of culinary school, I wanted to shape the industry and show everyone something they hadn’t seen before. Armed with my new piece of paper that told me and everyone else that I knew how to make hollandaise and butcher salmon, I was led to believe I was going to get my face on the covers of Saveur, Food & Wine or possibly my own cookbook. However, what I wanted to show the world was prepackaged and the same thing that the instructors at the school had spoon-fed to many other students like me. I was left with something that was not new and lacked my soul and any real foundation, and my quest to invent something new must begin. Luckily I came to the realization that the old way of doing food, the really old way, was and is still the right way. Restaurants, hotels and cooks of households in rural towns shopped in the market square that we know now as the Farmer’s Market and prepared what was available to them at the market. The geographic location of where you lived dictated what was available to you. For example: if you lived on the coast, the ocean’s treasures were there for you. If you lived in the mountains, goat, rabbit and cattle might more likely make an appearance on your menu. Of course the geographic location with its soil content and climate also affected what produce was available to you. Living in California I am fortunate as I have a huge array of vegetables and fruit here for my picking, as well as the most expansive coastline in the U.S. and several fresh water resources to fish from. Within a hundred mile radius all of these things are at my fingertips. The proximity eliminates the gas consumed to deliver any nonlocal product, and ensures freshness.
As a cook I want to serve foods that taste good and are exciting, but at what cost? Should I be serving pumpkin in the middle of spring? Or should I be flying in halibut from Alaska if I have fresh California halibut available? These don’t support my local economy or help my environment by flying or driving a product hundreds or even thousands of miles away to reach my table. As a consumer, these questions should be asked: Where did my vegetables come from? How is it that I am having English peas in the middle of fall? It’s spring, how or why am I enjoying figs? Is it that these things do not matter? Of course they do! Neither is available in those seasons. Again this goes back to the classic way of doing things. Foods should only be prepared while they are seasonally available. Now of course with modern developments like planes, trains and refrigeration, people in South Dakota can get fresh tomatoes, avocados or mangoes and in the blistering cold winter. Again, at what cost?
For me, I like having the ability to visit with the farmer and ask him or her what is on hand as well as what will be coming on line in the next few months. Sure, its fabulous to be able to display exotic items from far off places and sit in a dining room that looks like it was pieced together from a town in the La Mancha region of Spain, but again at what cost?
So now with a few years of industry realities under my toque, I have developed an idea of what the world needs to see (and I strongly emphasize the word, needs). With a cynical but very realist chef as a boss and mentor showing me the way as a young epicurean, I have realized that yeah, all the million dollar restaurants with chefs who have their names embroidered across their chests and dining rooms designed by GQ’s top rated interior designers are great but what are they doing for the community in which they reside? How are they giving back? Being in a small town versus a large city, this point is far more important in the birthing years because you do not have the masses to visit your establishment and pay your bills. However, in the grand scheme of things if more restaurants decided to only buy local either from fishmongers, cheese mongers, cattlemen or farmers, the local agricultural economy would thrive and allow for growth and security instead of being outsourced from a stranger hundreds of miles away. And come on, isn’t nice to know where your beef came from and not just seeing a picture of your happy cow in a green pasture chewing on some grass behind a wood fence? FYI, I have decided that Happy Cows come from Cayucos. Just look at that view!
Happy cows come from Cayucos
The beauty of this concept of Local, Organic & Sustainable is that any cuisine can fit this mold. It’s this simple if an ingredient is missing in order for your cuisine to be completed you either do away with the recipe or the cuisine as a hole. Don’t get me wrong, I love having all the Chinese, Thai, Indian or Italian restaurants around to dine at but just imagine how much better they would be if they were based in their proper environment. This idea allows for a fresh menu that correlates with what is fresh that day. This is so cutting edge because now the cook is faced with a challenge to prepare something what is available now and not with a set of ingredients he or she is so used to having readily available due to modern logistic capabilities. Could there be a better market for the consumer? Farmers, ranchers and fishmongers working hand-in-hand with chefs to bring the consumer the freshest product available?
The very idea has sparked my appetite.
Happy people eat happy cows.