Local cuisine: enhancing your experience

I want to enhance the eating experience – plain and simple. It is my one true goal to enable you to fully enjoy your meals the way nature originally intended. It’s through the information and education that I am able to provide that I hope to enable my readers to take the next step in the right direction so that they may take hold of their lives through what you eat.  I sincerely hope that what I have provided so far has been helpful and informative in your decision making. You hear it all the time:you are what you eat; and it’s true. You can only output what you input.

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” ― J.R.R. Tolkein

First, allow me to share a story with you. Early in my culinary career (it’s been seven or eight years now), I was working in an upscale diner-esque atmosphere in Atlantic City, New Jersey. A little background: when you start off in the culinary field, you usually start off being a prep person then move up to pantry/cold station where you are in charge of salads and desserts. This is where I found myself at this particular moment in time.

It was a usual summer day of hectic prepping and getting ready for the throngs of tourists for the Atlantic City Air Show. The time was late July, or early August; I can’t remember specifically. One of the dishes I had to mise en place was a “fruit salsa” that went on a cake. One of the ingredients in this dish was blueberries. In my prepping travels, I found myself (as anyone working in the industry will tell you) standing perplexed in the walk-in fridge, wondering: “Why did I come in here?!” As I slowly recovered from my “walk-in syndrome,” my gaze fell upon a container of blueberries. “Ah-ha!” I exclaimed; and reached for the box. However, once I grabbed the item and looked at it, I realized something – these blueberries were from California. Now, I’m not sure if you know this, but Hammonton, NJ is the blueberry capital of THE WORLD and is located approximately 40 minutes by car from Atlantic City... The. Blueberry. Capital. Of. The. WORLD!

How can it be cost effective for a food distributor to ship blueberries across the country when the “best” blueberries in the world are less than 100 miles away?

It was at this pivotal moment in my life that I started to ask questions and gather information regarding the issue of local sourcing.

“Food is our problem. Food is our solution” – Ron Finley

If you’ve ever created a dish or grown an edible plant such as an herb and cooked with it, you understand that there is a bond created between you and the experience that can be very rewarding and instantaneously gratifying. You know when you put your heart and soul into that creation; the result is a direct projection of your dedication. Now, the time has come to take it to the next level.

Locally sourced product allows you to enjoy the fruits of your land - your personal land that you call home. Now, I’m not saying you need to start being a gardener or farmer and raise your own produce and protein (but you should). I’m merely stating the fact that it takes less money to transport the product, there are fewer middlemen (thus making it cheaper), and here’s the best part: you personally support small business and your local community. On a microeconomic scale, if we keep the money in one location, it tends to reverberate.  Go to the source.

If you’ve ever traveled, you came into contact with foreign substances to which your body had no prior exposure. You may have noticed having a reaction to these elements.Be it a runny nose, headache, or cold-like symptoms, your body reacts to foreign substances. Now take a moment to pause; and think.

Where did your food come from?

If you travel to another location and suffer some kind of side effect or possible illness/death (think of infiltrated/untreated water systems) by simply exposing your being to that intrusive and strange substance, what else could it possibly doing to the inside of your body - what are the long-term effects?

Does the constant collision of international pathogens with your immune system wear away at your body so much so that it’s almost like WWIII inside your being?

I’m not a scientist by any measure; but, I am still doing a lot of research into this with the hopes of finding an answer. It’s something to think about.

My experiences that I’ve had with local cuisine have been nothing more definitive than game changing.

When you drink wine, you are supposed to inhale first to prepare your palate to taste it properly. This allows to you enjoy the wine to the fullest… blah, blah, blah. But here’s the thing: the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the pollution that surrounds you are elements of your environment. You dwell in it; it dwells in you. When any pollutant or chemical hazard is exposed to your area, it is exposed to you. It is your interactive world.

Here comes the good part. If your body doesn’t have to focus on defending itself against foreign elements, the brain allows more ease of taste. When I cook local product, I find that I use less salt than with imported items. Why? Because all those pathogens have already been exposed and are contained in you; you get to taste food for the way it was meant to be. Not frozen or in a can; and certainly a burger made out of thousands of cows from all over the world! This stuff is as fresh as you can possibly get. Processed foods tend to be full of salt, sugar, and fat’s to make them taste like what we are expecting. News flash! Local and fresh product tastes better. It’s as simple as that. Take for example: have you ever grown your own tomatoes? Are they not the best tomatoes ever? They’re local; that’s why.  

If you want to experience this phenomenon known as local cuisine ,there are many things you can do:

1. Join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture): These tend to be local farmers who have a size of land portioned off for financial contributors. You pay a flat rate at the beginning of the season and each week you get to go to the farm and either receive a box/basket worth of produce or pick out what you want from a selection.
2. Eat at local restaurants that source locally: I would suggest contacting your state’s agriculture department. They often list sustainable businesses and farmers on their website, and have a variety of useful information specific to each region.
3. Purchase locally grown food from your supermarket: Most supermarkets will supply local (or at least within the state) produce and meat when it’s in season. However, you are not going to notice a huge price difference until the supply is greater than the demand. Keep an eye out for these items.

We are able to take control over what we eat. We do not have to be subjected to corporate influence over our dietary choices. We are all one community that depends on each other for survival. Help us help ourselves and create a sustainable world that we can enjoy and grow in, not a world created for us by financially driven corporations.