Across this country, a lot of small farm towns are becoming ghost towns. Farm work that required so much manpower is now being replaced by mechanization, leaving these towns empty without any way to lure the young people that grew up there back to their streets.
It used to be that these agricultural towns would ship off all of their best produce to the top restaurants in the cities and the town residents were left to buy the mediocre produce from large agribusinesses from other parts of the country. Some agricultural towns, like Walla Walla, have capitalized on the rich land surrounding them to produce a gastronomical revolution. Bolstered by the outstanding wineries that surround town, Walla Walla restaurants like Saffron are making good on the land.
At Saffron, we had the rhubarb strawberry salad and pork belly with an absolutely outstanding Kerloo Cellars tempranillo. The strawberry flatbread with ricotta and mint for dessert was life-changing.
Walla Walla has blossomed with the local food movement. Where once its restaurants and supermarkets were supplied by the agribusiness giants, their food is now coming from where it should have coming from for so long: its own backyard. It’s not a novel concept. When you eat food that comes from the area and season in which it was meant to grow, you get real food. Sometimes the whole local organic food movement seems a little blown out of proportion. What they really should have marketed it to us as was just plain food.
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