Locavoring it

The far-reaching influence of local food

Thanks to BoingBoing and the Washington Post, I came across two articles today of particular interest to Locavores, Slow Foodies, and hedonists like myself. Putting these two next to each other seems to highlight also the inherent conflict of interest in which we seem to have found ourselves amidst aggressive marketing campaigns-of-the-moment.

The first is a rather cunning insight on the ironies of Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement:

For the foodstuff artisan (commonly dirt poor and neglected somewhere in the planet’s backwoods), Slow Food has a strong value proposal. It is, among its many other roles, a potent promotion machine. Transforming local rarities into fodder for global gourmets is, of course, profitable. And although he’s no capitalist, the much honored Petrini is more justly described as a major cultural figure; he was among the first to realize that as an economic system globalization destroys certain valuable goods and services that rich people very much want to buy. In a globalized “flat world,” the remaining peaks soar in value and become natural clusters for a planetary elite.

The second, and perhaps more important article, alerts us to the fact that the fast-food chain Chipotle, among others, has started to move towards local producers like Joel Salatin of PolyFace Farms:

There was no fanfare or official announcement. Even when the pork turned up in the first carnitas burrito last summer, no change was made to the menu or the $5.75 price. It wasn’t until last fall, two months after Polyface Farm’s pork made its debut, that a sign was posted on the days it was available. “We wanted to start slow, for us and for them,” says Phil Petrilli, Chipotle’s operations director for the northeast region. “This is a farm that’s used to dropping off 12 chickens at the local restaurant.” One of the fastest-growing chains in the nation, Chipotle serves about 350 pounds of pork per week in Charlottesville alone and more than 5 million pounds annually at its 700 restaurants.

This month, Chipotle hopes to serve 100 percent Polyface pork in Charlottesville. But that success comes after 17 months of complex negotiations and logistics, including buying extra cooking equipment, developing new recipes, adjusting work schedules and investing in temperature-monitoring technology for Polyface’s delivery van. In recent months, Petrilli has visited the Charlottesville outlet about every two weeks, four times as often as he visits other restaurants in the region.

I’ll be welcoming changes like this with open arms, because, in the words of George Orwell, “you see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market-gardeners.” Isn’t it about time?

sneakypeteiii is a doctoral student in Chemistry at Caltech. He has been eating since he was a child, and reckons himself quite good at it. (see more of his posts).

© 2008 la.foodblogging.