Amy Cotler - The Locavore Way: Discover and Enjoy the Pleasures of Locally Grown Food

The Locavore Way

Discover and Enjoy the Pleasures of Locally Grown Food

AMY COTLER

The mission of Storey Publishing is to serve our customers by
publishing practical information that encourages
personal independence in harmony with the environment.

Edited by Carleen Madigan
Art direction and book design by Dan O. Williams
Illustrations by Marc Rosenthal
Indexed by Christine R. Lindemer, Boston Road Communications

2009 by Amy Cotler

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages or reproduce illustrations in a review with appropriate credits; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other without written permission from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cotler, Amy.
The locavore way / by Amy Cotler.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-60342-453-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Food supplyUnited States. 2. Local foods.
3. Community-supported agriculture. 4. Farmers markets.
5. Grocery shopping. I. Title.
HD9005.C67 2009
641.3'1dc22

2009038244

A special thanks to my husband and daughter, Tommy and Emma; to my sister, Joanna, for her editorial eye; to Cathy Roth, my local food companion; and to all the farmers who showed me the real thing firsthand. Thanks to my illustrator, Marc Rosenthal; to my art director, Dan Williams; and to my patient editor, Carleen Madigan.

Thanks, also, to those who lent a hand, sharing their expertise and trying out recipes, including Naomi Alson, Karen Arp-Sandel, Dan Barber, Amy Bodiker, Ellen Cotler, Ruth Dinerman, Rob Fairpoint, Elizabeth Keene, Robin Dropkin, Benno Friedman, Kathy Harrison, Melissa Kogut, Stacy Miller, Peter Platt, Judy Rabinowitz, Vikki Reed, Eileen Rosenthal, Kathy Ruhf, Jessica Savory, Rose Tannenbaum, Mark Winne, and Barbara Zheutlin.

STEP ONE:
SHOP FOR LOCAL FOODS

STEP TWO:
EAT SIMPLY AND SEASONALLY

STEP THREE:
CONNECT AND ENGAGE

For my dad, who showed me the difference.

Locavore:Anyone who seeks out and savors foods grown, raised, or produced close to home.

Bite into a Macoun apple, so tangy it cleans your teeth, handed to you at the farmers market by Elizabeth Ryan, the farmer who grew it. Pick, then pop into your mouth, a raspberry red-ripe and still warm from the sun from Howden Farm, right down the road.

With pleasure and connection at its core, eating locally shifts how we engage with the most seminal ingredient in our lives: our food. The deceptively simple act of eating fresh, seasonal foods grown close to home is creating a wave of change. It moves us away from the horrors of industrialized farms and feedlots, with their seasonless foods produced for their high yield, low cost, and easy transport, toward something different: Imagine a healthy landscape, dotted with small farms raising food without ravaging the land, water, and air, promoting better-nourished communities and local economies, and creating less dependence on the fossil fuels needed to transport food from afar.

While the best part of eating locally is the food itself, its context and the stories behind it enrich the experience of eating it. The act of eating locally acknowledges agricultures importance while encouraging farms to produce a multitude of distinctive foods, rather than the generic supermarket staples we see every day. And it provides a way for us to celebrate our diverse culinary traditions together.

Let me be your guide to this new world of eating. As your local food companion a pragmatic food zealot with 30 years in the culinary trenches Ill show you how to plunge in, in your own way. Ill give you the tools for finding and sharing fresh local bounty, cooking and savoring it in season, and even growing a bit of your own food. There are numerous ways you can engage with your community to increase support for local food and local farms; Ill show you how to get started.

My goals are to respect your smarts, teach you how to make your own choices, then send you off into the world to change it, one delicious bite at a time.

Im the lucky daughter of serious eaters. My dad fell in love with Japanese food as a code cracker in World War II. A Bronx boy, he grew beefsteak tomatoes in our suburban garden. My mom was a creative cook and hostess who had explosive culinary energy, cooking her way through Julia Childs endless cassoulet recipe and exotics like Indonesian Rijsttafe. This was balanced with typical Americana fare, like a dish that featured broccoli, fluffy white bread, and Cheez Whiz. They taught me to taste, cook, and seek culinary adventures.

When I was 7, we spent a long weekend in the Catskills on a family farm. There was a muddy pond, too many cow patties to avoid, and a goat who butted my little sister. But what I remember most was eating those eggy eggs with their saturated, orange, stand-up yolks in a sunny room overlooking the farms beautiful fields, after having met the chickens, the farmer, and the farmers wife (who had cooked the eggs). This was my first local food experience, and I was hooked.

Since that breakfast, many years ago, Ive been seeking out farm-fresh food. And advocating for local farms and the foods they produce by encouraging connections between farms and consumers has become the core of my work. I was lucky enough to come of age during Americas shift from the world of iceberg lettuce to a rainbow of salad greens. Ive had the pleasure of working as a chef, caterer, educator, cookbook author, and food activist, all with the goal of bringing fresh food to as many people as possible, while empowering them to cook confidently with quality ingredients grown close to home.

My involvement with local food advocacy began when my family and I moved to the stunning Berkshire hills in western Massachusetts in 1990. By chance, I fell in with a band of heady agricultural progressives that included Robyn Van En, who spearheaded the groundbreaking community supported agriculture (CSA) movement in North America. The connection was transformative, bringing together the personal and the political, my passions for local food and for social justice. Through this grassroots group, which later became Berkshire Grown one of the early local food and farms advocacy organizations in the country I saw the farm-to-fork connection in a larger context. Our goal was to put a face on farming, on food produced with respect for people and the planet, to boost a localized alternative to industrial agriculture, as a means to literally eat our way to a better world.