Laura Reiley's top-notch investigative reporting in her article in "Farm to Fable: At Tampa Bay farm-to-table restaurants, you're being fed fiction," which appeared in the Tampa Bay Times, really pins down a number of important issues in Americans' attempts to eat better, eat more local, and what we're really trying to get at...eating more "real food." Judging by comments, the article drove people to a lot of anger towards restaurants. And people should be mad. Reiley exposed just how rarely restaurants really are serving local fare despite their chalkboards announcing local producer names and nearby farms. But maybe American consumers should be more mad at themselves.
I looked at a bag of potato chips being sold nearby: $1.25 for 1.5 ounces of salt and fried potatoes. If my math is right, that's $13.33/pound. Meanwhile, I sell premium-quality line-caught wild salmon from Alaska for $10.33/pound. Delivered to the customer's door (shipping included to all 50 states). And I've read comments and heard on the phone from Americans that it's expensive to buy fish. Fish with so much more nutrition and so less nasty fat and salt than those chips that cost not only $13.33/pound, a full $3.00 a pound for more for a lot less nutrition but also cost us so much in hospital bills (heart disease, type II Diabetes sound familiar, anybody?)
The Farm to Table movement and other food fads have put unrealistic expectations on all of us.
The expectations for restaurants these days are completely unrealistic. I was speaking with a chef friend, owner of a very hip, very high-quality farm-to-table type restaurant, and he was telling me about butter. He used to spend $600 a year on butter. Then his customers wanted organic butter. So he started spending $4000 a year on butter. And then his customers wanted local organic butter. Which he got. And he started spending $8000 a year on butter. The cookies are really damned good and worth it because, as anybody who bakes knows, the secret is in the butter. But...there's a reason restaurants order from Sysco, the largest food distributor probably in the world. You can save $7400 a year ordering from Sysco. And get plain old butter. And a good number of clients aren't going to notice the difference. This chef friend got just the nastiest review on Yelp when he served a $13 burger, made with ingredients all sourced within 50 miles of his restaurant. He lost money selling that local burger, but nevertheless, people are nasty cheapskates. My chef friend does lose money at his business, but it's a labor of love. He didn't pay himself last December because he wanted to be able to pay his top-notch employees during the holiday season. Yet he gets complaints about his "expensive," albeit super-delicious, high-quality food made with locally sourced ingredients, nutrition, and lots of value. I'd like to see the Yelp reviewer write write the same review about those $13.33/pound potato chips.
But clearly, there are two issues: economies of scale and distribution. For all the local food devotees, it's hard to come to grips with the fact that moving a 40,000-pound container of food attached to a big Kenworth truck is a lot more efficient than the farmer in his pick-up truck making local deliveries. I'd really hate to say it...moving that container is also, in general, more environmentally friendly than that farmer driving around in his pick-up truck with half a pig. It's also a reason I'm not too sad when I see cheap electronics "Made in China." What makes me sad is seeing food "Made In China." What people don't realize is that American industry sells a lot more important goods to China than the cheap electronics and junk we get from overseas. Like the fish company I work for. Chinese pay much bigger bucks for high-quality fish "Product of USA" than even Americans do, so we end up selling a lot more fish in Asia than you'd think. It's just a sad statement on American priorities: Per our GDP per capita, Americans spend a lot less on food than other countries where salaries are lower. It's a priorities thing...
I really blame the consumer here. For a dollar or two, people are willing to sacrifice quality, nutrition and health. We'll take the Thai shrimp harvested by slaves in dismal conditions over shrimp harvested in the USA. For a few bucks. It's all it takes. Meanwhile, American toddlers' vegetable of choice is...you guessed it....potato chips.
I can't get too mad at the restaurants. The supply chain is opaque at best. It's so rare to find a producer that has the time, the skills, the persistence to walk up to a restaurant and start selling direct. The producers are busy producing! Same thing for a chef. A chef might make a contact who produces a cage-free heritage breed chicken for him and he orders once. How does the chef maintain the relationship? Can the producer sell these chickens year-round? Does Mr. Chicken farmer have the health regs in line? Can he legally sell direct to the restaurant? Should he be able to sell direct? Some times the regs are ridiculous, but there's also basic food safety. Recognizing that food safety regs can be just plain crazy, food safety, to me, is still more important than local, organic.
Restaurants have something like a 90% fail rate at best. I've watched so many try to do the right thing and go out of business. It's really hard when we're a country that prioritizes cheap shit from China over eating well. I've just watched too many American friends who have TVs bigger than cars who spend several hundred bucks a month on video entertainment (cable, Netflix, Hulu, X-Box, etc.) and don't bat an eye. They get these over-sized TVs once every 2 or 3 years so they can see "every blade of grass" when they watch golf and so the experience is "better than going to the movies." These same people freak out over spending a couple of extra bucks on quality food. And restaurants cut costs to stay alive or make up stories about selling produce from John the Farmer down the street.
All of this relates indirectly to the common myth we have in our minds of hungry people being skinny. In this country, hungry people are more likely to be obese. Because, not just because they can't afford unprocessed food (because as I've shown, you get more value per $ with unprocessed food), it's because they haven't been educated to not eat the junk. It's easier to acquire junk food. The distribution model does indeed favor going to the convenience store and getting expensive, nutrition-less, value-less food. The difficulty/challenge isn't: Eat local or Eat organic. It's recognizing the value of eating real food.
When people get overly dogmatic about eating local, I go back to a conversation I had as a freshman in college about how lucky we were to have Orange Juice. In the middle of winter. In Washington state. No matter how you dress it, orange juice in Washington state isn't very local. Yet, as a modern American, I find it a basic essential. A little perk of being alive in the developed world in 2016. Sure, we could harvest and dry the needles of Douglas fir (reported to have pretty good levels of Vitamin C) or harvest some devil's club (another supposed flu fighter), and that would definitely be more "local" than drinking OJ. My wife and I do drink a fair amount of Doug fir tea and devil's club tea. But heck, I like orange juice. In winter. In Washington state. If harvesting devil's club became a popular fad, I could easily see rain forests in the Pacific Northwest being stripped bare of ground cover. Given economies of scale, growing conditions, and how we've made more efficient transportation logistics in the modern world, orange juice is a nice perk.
There are also other certain economies of scale that certain places enjoy and I'm really glad that we're able to take advantage of the great efficiencies made in transportation logistics. The growing seasons are longer in California, Texas, and, of course Mexico, where the labor is cheaper, too. Why not take advantage of these economies of scale? I like root vegetables in winter, too, but it's nice to have other things, too. It's okay to get strawberries from Mexico in February if you're really craving them. Sure, the local ones are going to be better, more nutritious during those 3 weeks in summer when they're available, but if you've got a craving for pineapple and you live in Wisconsin, get a fricking pineapple. Don't beat yourself up about it. Or, if you want potato chips that cost $13.33/pound, go for it. It's your choice. But being compassionate with the idea that it's difficult, and sometimes, maybe not even necessary or prudent, for restaurants to go completely "Farm to Table." Stop getting hung up on food fads and recognize that every food choice you make has consequences, both positive and negative, on your health and the physical and social environment.
