There’s nothing quite like walking the dog on an ordinary winter morning in D.C., turning the corner, and seeing dinner growing out of the trunk of a street tree in front of your own house. <instant adrenaline rush> Right at eye level—there—a fresh, meaty clump of oyster mushrooms, the same exact ’shrooms sold at Whole Foods for $8.99 a pound. SCORE! Nearly two pounds of delectable beauties became a hearty wild mushroom bisque that very night.

Other people had probably seen those mushrooms, too, who wouldn’t for a moment have considered eating them—after all, there are many poisonous mushrooms out there that can turn your liver to goo and kill you. Indeed, no one should ever pick and eat a wild mushroom, or any wild plant for that matter, unless they are 100 percent certain they have identified it accurately. But the oyster mushroom is easy to identify, and it has no poisonous lookalikes. (None of the bracket mushrooms—the ones that grow out of dead or dying trees—are poisonous, but not all are edible.)

Eating wild food you’ve gathered yourself is the ultimate locavore experience. For those who enjoy being in nature, as well as cooking with the freshest possible ingredients—not to mention finding tasty, cool stuff for free—foraging is an edible treasure hunt.

The Mid-Atlantic region has a multitude of edible wild plants, mushrooms, berries, and nuts growing throughout the year, in the countryside, nearby mountains, and even in empty lots and small pockets of green in highly populated areas.

Foraging has surged in popularity recently, spurred, in part, by Michael Pollan, who wrote about it in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and Scandinavian chef Rene Redzepi, whose award-winning restaurant Noma (and best-selling cookbook) features dishes made with foraged wild food.

Sometimes, vendors at city farmers markets sell foraged wild food alongside those they’ve grown themselves: ramps (wild leeks) and morel mushrooms in the spring; lambs quarters, nettles, wineberries, and purslane in summer; and chanterelle mushrooms in the fall. How ironic to pay three or four dollars for a small bunch of lamb’s quarters when a shopper can walk past an armful of the same plants, free for the picking, growing along the edge of the road where they’ve parked their car!

To be fair, picking along busy streets is not a great idea because of potential contamination from auto exhaust and dogs—but you get the idea. With a little bit of effort and knowledge, one can find the same wild food for free.

A word to the wise: removing plant materials from National Park Service lands is against the law. Check out the policy at city and county parks before foraging. Picking a blackberry won’t hurt the bush, and harvesting a mushroom won’t harm the mycelium it sprouts from, which is deep underground, but the rules are the rules…And be careful: there are Death Caps and Destroying Angels and Devil’s Weeds out there. Four people recently poisoned themselves accidentally by eating mushrooms they’d picked on their lawns; the Georgetown University Hospital mushroom poisoning center saved their lives. And an Australian chef died after gathering and eating poisonous mushrooms. Clearly, you should know what to look for, and more importantly, what to look out for.

So how does a novice forager go about acquiring the necessary knowledge? Field guides to edible wild plants and mushrooms can be useful, but the best way to learn is to have an expert show you where to look and what to avoid.

On a below-freezing January morning in rural Virginia, a dozen bundled-up would-be foragers gather around Tim MacWelch, a foraging and wilderness survival expert. He is kneeling on the ground, digging up what looks like a small weed with a trowel. Wild carrot—he points out tiny hairs on the stem, one of the ways to distinguish it from its dangerous cousins: fool’s parsley and poison hemlock. The group passes it around and examines it. “Smell the root,” instructs MacWelch. “It smells just like a sweet carrot. Hemlock smells nasty.”

MacWelch runs wild edible plant workshops year round featuring the seasonally available edible plants at his Earth Connection School of Wilderness Survival in Northern Virginia, near the Quantico Marine Base. Personable, good-humored, and deeply knowledgeable about the natural world and the skills Native Americans took for granted, MacWelch grew up on a nearby farm in a multi-generational family of outdoorsmen and hunters. He stops at a bare bush with tiny red berries still clinging to the branches, puts one of the berries in his mouth, and urges the group to do the same. “Carolina rose hips. They taste like fruit leather to me.” A good source of vitamins, too.

Earlier, MacWelch had poured cups of sassafras tea he’d brewed for the group. He stops at a bare sassafras bush and shows the group the distinctive bark, and tells them how to dig up the roots and prepare them. He wants his students to know what to do and what to eat if they find themselves lost in the wild, telling them about each food’s calorie contents (the more the better), vitamins, and minerals.

He trades tips with foodies and cooks about the best ways to prepare wild foods.

Later, MacWelch passes around a sack of cookies his wife has made with wild acorn flour, which the workshop participants wash down with white pine needle tea. Information on upcoming spring and summer workshops can be found on his website. MacWelch, who forages for the prized morel every day, probably won’t share the secret places where he finds them. Most mushroom hunters won’t. But you can go on guided mushroom walks led by experts affiliated with area mycological associations to find your own secret places.

Zora Margolis, a frequent contributor to Flavor, has been an inveterate forager since the early 1970s. She and her husband once gathered more than 40 pounds of chanterelles in the Santa Monica mountains near Malibu.

With a reputation for luxury hotel accommodations and fine dining, Keswick Hall at Monticello’s restaurant Fossett’s might not seem like an obvious choice to those looking for a locavore experience. But with a focus on local food and a homegrown chef, Fossett’s offers a journey into local culinary history that is both accessible and delicious.

Fossett’s is named after Thomas Jefferson’s chief cook at Monticello, Edith Fossett (1787-1854), who also served Jefferson during his presidential years at the White House. The restaurant’s chef, Dean Maupin, shares an authentic connection to Jefferson and Albemarle County. He is an eighth-generation Albemarle County native who developed his food-focused work ethic working with his grandfather at the Maupin Brothers Store in Crozet, which thrived in the 1970s and ’80s, and sourced its produce from the surrounding region.

The family remains well-known locally: Pete Maupin is the longtime produce buyer for the Great Valu Market (formerly IGA) in Crozet. Maupin’s wife, Erin Souder Maupin, is a pastry chef and, according to her husband, “quite special.” She does the majority of the cooking at home, with a focus on comfort dishes like pot roast and roasted chicken.

Maupin describes his cuisine as New American, with a constantly changing menu based on what he feels like cooking as well as the availability of local ingredients. Well-known local sources include Double H Farm, Gryffon’s Aerie, Polyface Farm, and the Local Food Hub. Niche farm sources include Sharondale Farm, which provides gourmet mushrooms; Autumn Olive Farms which provides goat meat; Free Union Grass Farm which provides duck; and Hall Autumn Harvest Farm, which provides Berkshire Hog meat. His fish choices include Virginia oysters, Rag Mountain trout, and Chesapeake Bay rockfish. And this fall he began bringing in an artisanal product designed specifically for Keswick Hall by Richmond-based Sausage Link: the “Albemarle Short Link.”

It is “a sweet-savory breakfast link tasting of pork, apples, funky apple cider, and a peppery punch,” says Maupin.

Albemarle Baking Company provides fresh bread daily, and an on-site pastry chef creates desserts such as the chocolate pavé. The Chef’s Garden is an integral part of the restaurant’s philosophy. Maupin explains that while there is a romantic notion to growing your own food, it serves a much more practical purpose. He says, “it’s a necessity, and very efficient. There’s a real economic connection and it makes total business sense.”

He envisions that he will always grow food, no matter his place of employ. When planning the garden, he focuses on the basics—mixed lettuces, Swiss chard, beets, pea tendrils, peppers, and tomatoes.The garden produces throughout the year; recently harvested baby beets are currently featured on the menu. The only downside Maupin sees to the garden is that the harvest “almost becomes too much—an intriguing challenge!” Virginia gardeners with overflowing baskets of zucchini and cucumbers can surely relate.

Maupin dreams of adding a greenhouse to the venture, allowing Keswick Hall to expand its home-grown bounty. In 2010, Keswick Hall planted its Courtside Vineyard with Petit Manseng, a rare grape from the Gironde region of southwestern France. Richard Hewitt, long-time Sommelier at Keswick Hall— not to be confused with Keswick Vineyards—described the story of the harvest of the first grapes in 2011 with passion. The season was terribly wet, which frustrated all grape growers in the region. His grapes had a 10-day harvest window. Thunderstorms threatened the crop, and Hewitt called on eight friends to help.

Using pool towels, the group picked and dried 600 pounds of grapes, which produced Keswick Hall’s first wine from grapes grown on its grounds. The wine is deliciously bright. The commitment to local food commitment is also reflected in Keswick Hall’s Villa Crawford, which offers a country lunch buffet for under $20. The circa-1912 boiler room has been transformed into a dark, luxe private dining room known as Treble. The name is drawn from Thomas Jefferson, who wrote: “I double the doctor’s recommendation of a glass and a half of wine each day and even treble it with a friend.”

Fossett’s Restaurant
701 Club Drive
Kewsick, VA 22947
(434) 979-3440
www.keswick.com

Anne Bedarf lives in Albemarle County, Va., where she and her husband Derek keep chickens and run a “Garden Buddy” program from their land near Monticello.

And now for something completely different!

For the past two years, the Flavor tasting panel has focused mainly on the better-known varietals of Virginia: Cabernet, Merlot, and Petit Verdot reds, and Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and Viognier whites.

This year, our panel of local expert sommeliers explored two white varietals: Riesling and the lesser-known Petit Manseng. Both are usually made slightly “off-dry,” with some residual sugar. The wines were submitted by winemakers who responded to Flavor’s invitation. And, like last year, there were a couple of “ringers”—both French Rieslings from Alsace.

Six area wine professionals did the sniffing, swirling, and savoring this year: Neal Wavra, sommelier at The Ashby Inn; Kevin Switz of The Ashby Inn and Vinosity; Matt Carroll, formerly of 2941, now studying for the Master Sommelier exam; beverage consult ant Gina Chersevani, formerly of PS7; Owen Thomson of Jose Andres’ Think Food Group; and Samantha Withall, beverage director of The Hamilton, the new Washington, D.C. restaurant of the Clyde’s Group. She hosted the evening in one of the restaurant’s elegant wood-trimmed private dining rooms.

There were Rieslings from 12 Virginia wineries and two Alsatian ringers (neither of which scored in the top three!). Riesling is a much under-appreciated variety, perhaps because it can range in style from bone dry to distinctly sweet. It pairs well with fowl, pork, and shellfish, and is a winner with spicy Asian or Middle Eastern dishes. Most of the wines in our tasting finished with a slight but noticeable sweetness.

It’s worth noting here that the tasters, as is usually the case, didn’t always agree. So, if even the professionals don’t see eye-to-eye, why should you? Their notes can give you guidelines, but in the end, it’s your palate that tells the tale. So sample and decide!

First among the Riesling standouts was Ox-Eye 2010. It was the favorite of both Samantha Withall and Neal Wavra among the Rieslings. Neal liked the notes of tropical and citrus fruits backed up by good acidity. Samantha noted the “gripping fruit sweetness upfront, with a bit of effervescence on the finish.”

The Rapidan River Riesling Dry American, the second place winner, was the overall favorite of Matt Carroll. He tasted grapefruit, melon, lemon verbena, and thyme and found the wine “pleasantly savory” overall. Kevin Swit z found cantaloupe in the aroma and melon flavor on the palate, but his favorite was the Shenandoah Vineyards Johannisberg Riesling Dry 2011 Mount Juliet.

The Barboursville Virginia Riesling 2010 placed third. It was “easy to drink,” said Withall. Thomson tasted notes of pineapple, lime, mango, and honeysuckle, while Carroll found “tropical elements” on the palate and a “creamy texture.”

The other wine in this year’s tasting was Petit Manseng, a grape from the Jurancon in the foothills of the French Pyrenees which has adapted well to the long growing season in Virginia. In France, Petit Manseng is used for both dry and late-harvest sweet wines; Virginia winemakers are vinifying it into both off-dry table wines and dessert wines. The panel’s first choice was Sugarleaf Petit Manseng 2010.

Chersevani and Withall both picked up the scent of popcorn on the nose. This was Withall’s favorite of the Petit Mansengs. Chersevani liked its “tangerine skin” sweetness. Switz tasted lemon oil and toasted nuts—“a great balanced wine.”

Number two: Mount Juliet 2008. This was Wavra’s first choice; he tasted baked apple. Chersevani found  peppery Bosc pear taste. This was also Switz’s favorite among the Petit Manseng wines.

Brad’s Stickdog Petit Manseng 2008 reminded Carroll of roasted almonds, walnuts, baked yellow apples, and ripe pears—with a “warm nuttiness” at the finish. Switz called it a “great wine,” with honey, white peach, and apricot on the palate. As in each of our two previous tastings, the panelists were impressed by the range of both grapes and styles in the hands of Virginia winemakers. With each passing year, Virginia wine becomes more varied and sophisticated.

Bill Plante is Senior White House Correspondent for CBS News and a longtime wine aficionado and collector.

This winter, Michael Reeps got the chance to bring an idea to life: creating an online farmers market to connect Staunton farmers with town residents. The Staunton Creative Community Fund gave Reeps a grant to kickstart his website, Staunton Fresh. It’s not surprising: this is a town that thrives on nurturing the local food movement.

From its fresh dining options to its farm-centric tours, this Shenandoah Valley enclave is a must-visit destination for anyone who loves tasty food and scenic views.

Start your trip by building up an appetite with a tour of Polyface Farms. When farmer Joel Salatin showed the world how he raises, slaughters, and guts his chickens in the movie “Food, Inc.,” he put Central Virginia on the locavore map. Transparency is a central tenet to Polyface, which allows visitors to explore any and all parts of the farm through self-guided tours. Watch the pastured chickens and hens, the foraging cows, or the foraging rabbits. Or,for a more intense experience, opt for one of Polyface Farms’s Lunatic Tours, a two-hour hay wagon tours offered twice a month. (Lunatic Tours must be booked in advance.)

Next, head into town for a hearty brunch. Cranberry’s Grocery and Eatery is known for its sumptuous locally roasted organic coffee, Lester’s Best. Its menus feature a variety of local delights, too, including eggs, sausage, honey, maple syrup, and gelato. Try the homemade yeast ‘n malt waffles or the Southwest tofu scramble.

The arts are also revered in Staunton. The Virginia Hot Glass Festival (April 28 and 29) celebrates the art of glass blowing, flame working, and bead making at the Sunspot Studios in historic downtown, which showcases artists from across the state. A different expression of art can be found just two blocks away at Mockingbird, a lively music venue with fantastic food.

Local roots music is the specialty here, though Mockingbird’s stage welcomes jazz, rock, and soul/funk performers as well. It’s the perfect accompaniment to a season dinner  composed of meats and produce from local farms. (If live music isn’t your thing, check out the five playhouses in town.)

Staunton’s historic Stonewall Jackson Inn is the largest but not the only lodging option. There are plenty of cozy bed-and-breakfasts, including the historic Artist’s House Bed and Breakfast run by painter Sharon Kincheloe. After check in, be sure to walk in the colorful gardens.

After a good night’s sleep, embrace the morning at the Staunton-Augusta Farmers Market, open till noon on Saturdays. Then, take a jaunt out to the countryside. Barren Ridge Vineyards is a lush vineyard set against the backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Just 10 miles east of Staunton, the winery offers complimentary tours and tastings every day of the week.

Appetite whet, head back into town to Ox-Eye Vineyards. Although its grapes are grown out in the country (about 10 miles southwest of town), Ox-Eye’s tasting room is right in downtown Staunton.

Finish off your day at Zynodoa, where Chef James Harris crafts his menus daily to reflect what local farms are delivering. His sources include Harvest Thyme Herb Farm, Veritas Vineyards, Mountain View Farm dairy, and Polyface Farms, and Zynodoa boasts its own vegetable garden. A recent menu featured ricotta gnocchi with pickled shallots, sunchokes, and rosemary potato butter with a pork roast smothered in caramelized apples and onions served with herbed spaetzle.

But you’ve only just scratched the surface of Staunton. There’s George Bowers Grocery —which stocks an array of locally grown food, both plain and fancy, as well as beer and wine, and serves as something of a town gathering center (as well as a pop-up restaurant space); Shenandoah Hops for an array of beers; Giancarlo European Pastries—exquisite tarts and cakes; Cocoa Mill Chocolatier; gelato at the Split Banana; and fresh made bread at Newtown Baking. And we never leave town without a bag of Kitch’n Cook’d chips.

Polyface Farms

Cranberry’s Grocery and Eatery

Virginia Hot Glass Festival

Mockingbird

The Artist’s House Bed and Breakfast

Staunton-Augusta Farmers Market

Barren Ridge Vineyard

Ox-Eye Vineyards

Zynodoa

Staunton Fresh

Suemedha Sood is a columnist for BBC Travel and a lover of local food, craft beer, and cute dogs.

The marinated grass-fed steak drips with sweet and spicy flavors. The bright greens, carrots, daikon, and radish create a kaleidoscope of freshness. And on top of it all is a flawlessly fried egg, its yolk a vivid orange bubble just waiting to burst.

It’s pretty impressive that this fresh and tasty bibimbap, a traditional Korean rice dish, is prepared in a little truck outside the Ballston Metro in Arlington, Va. What’s more impressive is that its ingredients are almost entirely sustainably or locally sourced. Seoul Food DC’s bibimbap is its most popular (and possibly most delicious) menu item. That’s probably because at just $7 to $8.50 (depending on what kind of protein you get), it costs pretty much the same as comparable dishes at local food trucks that don’t use as fine ingredients.

“We don’t make the price like the ‘organic price,’” says co-owner Chef Anna Goree. “Customers don’t want to pay $10 or $12 for lunch…So we have to reduce our profit.”

Because Anna and her husband, co-owner J.P., use sustainable and local sources, they pay an extra $2 to $2.50 per pound for beef and an extra $1.50 per pound for chicken. But they see the benefit in using higher-quality products. “Eighty-five percent of our customers are regulars,” Anna says. “And they are our promoters.” She frequently overhears regulars enlightening new customers about Seoul Food’s antibiotic-free grass-fed beef or its pole-and-troll caught skipjack tuna.

In Arlington, she says, people are becoming a lot more conscious about where their food comes from. Before starting Seoul Food this past summer, Anna and J.P. both worked at Whole Foods—Anna as a pastry chef (her training was at L’Academie de Cuisine in Maryland) and J.P. as a butcher. Anna grew up in the food industry; her mother owned a restaurant in Seoul.

Seoul Food incorporates fusion elements, serving dishes like kalbi burritos, bulgogi sushi, and a butternut squash curry. “It’s because I’ve lived here almost 25 years,” Anna explains. “I don’t eat only Korean.” After years of cooking at home for three kids and crafting desserts for work, her repertoire incorporates Mexican, Italian, French, and all sorts of other influences.

But her Korean upbringing informs the philosophy about food that she and her husband share. “There’s a saying in Korea that you shouldn’t go more than 10 miles to get the food that you eat.” The products at Seoul Food may come from more than 10 miles away, but they come from regional growers. The husband-and-wife team tried to work directly with farms, but ended up having to turn to their former employer, Whole Foods, to find their ingredients instead. With no employees, they couldn’t afford the time to drive out to the farms each week.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” says Forrest Pritchard, farmer and owner of Smith Meadows, a Berryville farm that operates its own food truck in Arlington and D.C. Small farms are already so bogged down with raising animals, growing produce, and selling at farmers markets that working with restaurants can be a challenging addition. Restaurants need high volumes of customized shares, and they need them on a deadline. “That’s the problem the CEO of Chipotle kept running into,” said Pritchard. “He said he’d go to find some of these small farms and they’d only be raising three pigs in a month. Well a lot of these food trucks go through three pigs during lunch, easily.”

Smith Meadows has a unique perspective, of course, having both a farm and a food truck. The truck sets up shop at the Arlington Farmers Market, the Takoma Farmers Market, and in Rosslyn on Lynn Street. The idea for a food truck came from years of selling at farmers markets. “The first thing we noticed was that nobody else was doing it,” Pritchard said. “We’re always interested in potentially doing something else to bring people to the farmers market, and it just seemed like a really easy way to take the products that we already had and make the market better.”

Smith Meadows raises grass-fed beef, lamb, pork, and chickens, and its food truck serves up such dishes as a rosemary lamb sandwich with organic pesto and organic mustard, a breakfast sandwich made with free-range eggs and cheese from Fields of Grace Farm, and an array of empanadas. Like Seoul Food, Smith Meadows works hard to keep prices low. “There’s so much that somebody expects to pay for a hamburger in a food truck,” Pritchard said. “I ignore that at my own peril.”

His truck serves hamburgers for about $5 each, empanadas for about $3 each, and other sandwiches for between $3 and $8. So if it’s possible to use local products, keep prices competitive, and make a profit, why don’t more food trucks and carts do it? “My instinct would be to say it’s a matter of not enough abundant supply,” Pritchard says. “We’re in this really simultaneously amazing and frustrating point in food production where we don’t have enough experienced food producers growing the food that we need.”

In urban areas, there’s the added hurdle of distribution. That’s certainly been the experience of Michelle Nguyen and Gauri Sarin, the co-owners of Something Stuffed, a new food truck coming to Arlington and Tysons this month. “It is very difficult to get these products close to where you’re vending your food, instead of having to drive out to farms,” says Sarin. Something Stuffed plans to source from farms including Mount Vernon Farm in Sperryville and Maple Avenue Market, a farm and local foods store in Vienna. The truck will work with Mount Vernon through a buyers’ club. Similar to a CSA but without the long-term commitment, the club lets customers place orders to be delivered every two weeks to a few central drop-off points in Northern Virginia. If more farms offered such programs, Sarin says, it would be far easier to source locally. While Sarin and Nguyen plan the debut of Something Stuffed, they are testing out menu items by hosting tastings and catering events. As the name suggests, the truck will feature stuffed foods like dumplings, empanadas, rolls, and wraps. “If you think about it, almost every type of cuisine from anywhere around the world has items that are stuffed, and that’s a big draw for me,” says Sarin, a self-taught chef. “It gives us more opportunity to be creative with our menu items.”

Something Stuffed also plans on affordable pricing. “Food trucks have the reputation of being cheap and convenient,” Sarin says. “But [that] doesn’t mean you can’t be utilizing good products too.”

Seoul Food
Twitter: SeoulFoodDC

Smith Meadows Food Cart
website

Something Stuffed
Twitter: Get_Stuffed

Suemedha Sood is a columnist for BBC Travel and a lover of food, craft beer, and cute dogs.

It’s fitting that Harrisonburg’s Local Chop & Grill House is housed in a portion of a massive structure that was, in the early 1900s, the City Produce Exchange. All time-worn brick and heavy timbers, the building’s 2006 renovation made room for a warm, welcoming restaurant that gets its raw materials from more than 40 local farmers and producers.

Whether it be Green Haven goat cheese kicking up the traditional macaroni and cheese, a delicate raw beet salad from Radical Roots, or a breast of chicken from Polyface Farms, the Local Chop & Grill House serves the best possible products that Shenandoah farms offer.

Husband-and-wife team Executive Chef Ryan Zale and General Manager Amanda Zale have made it their business to guarantee that: they personally visit each farm and vendor to make sure the ingredients are produced both sustainably and naturally. They observe the growing practices and assure themselves livestock is treated humanely, fed naturally, and raised in appropriate environments. The local producers are listed on the restaurant’s website.

“Sourcing locally can be more expensive, but you’re getting what you pay for—an organic, natural product that is the best of the best. The footprint is literally a footprint, not 1,000 miles on a truck, with the added benefit that all money spent goes back into the community. The farmers are the reason we’re here.”

But Ryan concedes local has its limits: He was unable to source the volume of beef necessary to support the daily operations of a chop house, so he engaged a producer from Kansas known for high-quality grass-fed, antibiotic- and hormone-free beef. Local meats, when available in sufficient quantities, are featured in entree specials and appetizers.

Ryan was graduated from PICA in Pittsburgh and then honed his skills in high-end restaurants from Pennsylvania to Atlanta before landing a coveted position at Patrick O’Connell’s five-star Inn at Little Washington.

Calling his two years there “the greatest and most intense culinary experience” in his career, the young chef learned about direct sourcing of local ingredients—from hunting mushrooms in nearby forests to cultivating friendships with local farmers. When he took over the Local Chop & Grill House kitchen, Ryan’s highest priority was meeting with area growers to determine what was available, when—the only way to craft a local, seasonal menu.

“If I see some beautiful Hubbard squash while walking through the farmers market, I’m putting it in some form on the menu that night,” he said.

Sourcing locally can be a challenge as adjustments need to be made for pricing, volume, and seasonal availability, but he enjoys the pressure—especially changing the menu based on what’s available at any given time.

“Recently we donated a five-course meal that was auctioned at a March of Dimes event. The people who won the dinner called the night before to let us know they would be in the following evening. It was great to walk in the cooler and compose a very special meal from the local products I had on hand. I love pushing the bar like that,” said Ryan.

Amanda, a Harrisonburg native and master mixologist, concocts specialty cocktails, oversees the impressive list of craft beers and wines and, most importantly, oversees the welcoming ambiance of the restaurant. Her favorite job, she says, is being Ryan’s “number one taste-tester.”

Walking through the massive entry doors, new guests can’t help but appreciate the history that  surrounds them. The sensitive renovation of the restaurant maintained the integrity of the former agricultural building, but made it warm and comfortable for diners. The elegant but relaxed dining room has the same exposed brick walls as the friendly bar, and it is adorned with portraits of the area farms and producers who supply the restaurant.

Some lucky diners even break bread with the farmers who supply the restaurant. The Local Chop & Grill House offers periodic “Local Food Flights” dinners. These three-course meals showcase ingredients from a single farmer or producer. The farmer comes to enjoy Ryan’s take on the fruits of his labor, and the diners get an intimate feel for what it took to get that particular fruit, vegetable, or meat from the farm to their table.

Of special note are the servers and bartenders employed at The Local Chop & Grill House, who are revered by Ryan and Amanda. Thanks to staff dinners, training classes, and Ryan’s nightly “Food Talks,” the employees are exceptionally knowledgeable about the origin of every item listed on the menu.

Open Tuesday-Saturday, the Local Bar opens at 4 p.m. with dinner service beginning at 5. Reservations are highly recommended.

The Local Chop & Grill House
56 W. Gay Street
Harrisonburg, Va.
540.801.0505
website

Michael Clune is a freelance writer residing in Virginia.  A former organic farmer, he is actively involved in helping farmers market their products locally.  His interests include sustainable agriculture, homesteading, and border collies.

“What are you doing here?” the neighbor demanded, elbowing her way through the cluster of Polyface customers surrounding our delivery vehicle. “You can’t do this!” she remonstrated, into the face of her dumbfounded neighbor who was in the middle of filling her cooler with pastured chickens and “salad bar” beef.

Citing homeowners association rules and regulations about solicitations and commerce, this neighbor was hot and bothered about a local food drop occurring in her community. The very idea. Tsk. Tsk. I suppose she never receives a UPS shipment. I’m sure she’s never hosted a bridal shower or Tupperware party.

What’s the difference between a group of friends getting together to play games and the same group getting together to pick up their local food order? The face of local food has many expressions: farmers markets, community supported agriculture, buying clubs, home delivery, office delivery. It doesn’t look like a supermarket, that’s for sure.

Innovation on this ragged edge of the local food distribution network creates nuances that don’t fit neatly into zoning and other regulatory definitions. These folks clustered around our delivery vehicle had ordered their food online and were simply meeting the delivery vehicle at an appointed place. We (the farmers) were not soliciting sales, not selling anything. It had already been sold. Just like a UPS delivery. If we had used a lot more time and petroleum to deliver to each household customer, it would not have attracted attention.

But because we (the farmers) were trying to be efficient and set up a food fellowship-shindig-social setting as well, the convergence attracted attention and raised the ire of a prudish neighbor.

Rather than appreciating the food connections and relationships being established, this neighbor was incensed that something was happening in her upscale neighborhood besides gardeners mowing the lawns, domestics cleaning the houses, and children either properly occupied with electronic entertainment inside or participating in off-site soccer games outside.

I’ve noticed that the wealthier the community the more the people who live there seem disconnected from their ecological moorings. Do they just assume that no matter how expensive energy becomes, they will always be the top feeders? Few things can be more environmentally reasonable than clothes lines, downspout rain catchments, gardens, backyard rabbits, chickens, and honey bees. But these elements smack of peasants, agrarianism, and self-reliance. Too many people think they’ve evolved to a higher level of sophistication than to be bothered by such drivel.

Just last week a city mayor confessed to me that she did not even have a kitchen in her home. Having just read Jared Diamond’s iconic “COLLAPSE,” I’m struck by the aloof, disconnected spirit of too many people. Apparently some folks think we’ll be the first culture to extricate ourselves from these nasty ecological moorings. They think we’ll be able to forget about our dependency on earthworms, soil, water, and air. I suppose they think we’ll all sail off on a Star Trek space ship eating breakfast in a tablet, living in a world without diapers and decomposition.

The whole crux of the local food movement depends on transparency and relationships. Too many people are far more passionate about the latest belly button piercing in Hollywood celebrity culture than what will become flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone at 6 p.m. That is tragic.

Instead of threatening litigation over a group of local food connectors and the farmer who braves expressways to bring nutrient density to town, neighbors and regulators should applaud and encourage such connections.

With all the hoopla about local food in our culture, I never cease to be amazed at the new hurdles thrown up to derail and distract this movement. The whole notion of local food is such a foreign concept that many people can’t even fathom what it looks like. And yet this community imbedded, shindig-oriented, rag-tag confluence of friends and food predates tyrannical neighbors who think they’ve risen above menial life responsibilities like food and soil.

If homeowners associations were really progressive, they’d be offering staging areas for local food connections to occur rather than using their rules to eliminate food interfaces. At some point, people need to realize that if they aren’t part of the solution, they’re part of the problem. Now go meet your farmer and get real food.

Internationally acclaimed farmer, conference speaker, and author Joel Salatin and his family operate Polyface Farm in Augusta County near Staunton, Va., producing and direct-marketing “salad bar” beef, “pigaerator” pork, and pastured poultry. He is also co-owner of T&E Meats in Harrisonburg.

The great dry-aged hams of Europe, including Italy’s prosciutto de Cinte Sineses and Spain’s jamon iberico de bellota, have historically had little competition from American products, and it’s almost inexplicable. The best hams are products of the woods, and the Appalachian forest that carpets the eastern U.S. is among the earth’s richest timber stands. The pigs that deliver the hams are ideal evolutionary machines for turning woodland biomass into that one perfect bite, and American farmers have long been at the leading edge of sustainable husbandry.

So when in 2007 the three partners behind Woodlands Pork—Nic Heckett, Chuck Talbott, and Jay Denham—launched an ambitious project on Talbott’s Black Oak Holler farm, in the heart of Appalachia’s Central Forest Region near Charleston, W.Va., American charcuterie lovers took notice. And Woodlands is preparing to take its European competitors by storm.

Forest management is at the heart of their effort, because the quality of the ham derives primarily from the acorns and other forest “fruit” the pigs eat in the wooded hills. Perhaps no one in America better understands this relationship than Talbott, whose years of research at North Carolina A&T culminated in the publication of his seminal 2005 paper, “Enhancing Pork Flavor and Fat Quality with Swine Raised in Sylvan Systems.”

The experiment behind Talbott’s paper set the stage for Woodlands Pork. With the help of farmers, he tested how controlled diets and forest foraging periods affected the taste of meat from Ossabaw Island hogs when compared to conventional pigs. Talbott chose the Ossabaw, a feral-like native of Georgia’s Sea Islands, because it is directly descended from Spain’s Iberico pigs from which the fabled iberico de bellota hams are derived. Both breeds are naturally disposed to a hard life spent roaming the forest.

Talbott’s experiment showed the Ossabaws raised in the forest tasted better than their counterparts, and the experiment proved a side benefit: “pigs raised in [the forest] re-emphasize the possibility of using a renewable forest resource as a food source for animal husbandry”—and the animals may help in re-establishing oak park savannas.

Talbott’s co-author, New York Times food writer Peter Kaminsky, later expounded on the topic in his book “Pig Perfect,” which helped make heritage breed hogs de rigueur in high-end restaurant kitchens.

The buzz surrounding Kaminsky’s book led Nic Heckett, an entrepreneur who had tried and failed to start a prosciutto importing business, to Talbott’s doorstep. Their first task was to turn Black Oak Holler into a laboratory to further Talbott’s research. Nothing has worked more strongly in the duo’s favor than the sheer richness of the Appalachian forest: Talbott has worked with a forester with the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative for nearly two decades to maximize acorn production on the farm.

A 30-year veteran of forest management, Scott Eggerud had never— until now—had a project aimed specifically at increasing acorn production. “This is a science that is not well understood in the U.S.,” he said. “We’re really trying to shove nature aside in as responsible a way as we can.”

Early on, Talbott and Heckett added Ossabaws to the equation. The Ossabaws, which have now been cross-bred with feral boars and Berkshire pigs, are pasture-raised for the first ten months of their lives before being released into the forest to gorge on nuts and shrubs for two months. At a year old they are ready for slaughter. Under the watchful guidance of master charcutier Jay Denham, who has apprenticed with ham makers in both Spain and Italy, the pigs are processed into hams and other cuts, including hickory-smoked bacon and sausage.

The hams are packed in salt for a few weeks before being hung for a minimum of two years, during which time the texture firms up and the ham becomes the perfect distillation of pork and the nutty flavors of the forest floor.

“We are trying to make our product globally competitive the same way the Mondavi family did for American wine,” said Heckett. “The flavor profiles will change slightly with each line of ham, because things like humidity and acorn abundance will change in the forest year after year. That’s what makes our ham so uniquely Appalachian and American.”

Woodlands Pork is opening a large facility in Louisville in 2012, where production of the newly trademarked Mountain Ham™ will be the focus. The partners hope to take the program they have mastered at Black Oak Holler and bring it to other farmers across Appalachia to build a network of responsible suppliers to fill demand for pigs.

Woodlands Pork has, after just a couple breeding and curing cycles, created a product that is turning heads across the country. Mountain Ham is showing up in more and more restaurants, including super chef Michael Mina’s restaurant empire—D.C.’s highend Bourbon Steak is one—and Cincinnati’s temple of pork, Local 127. Woodlands also recently won the prestigious American Treasures Award, which  celebrates small producers that create uniquely American food products.

Sam Hiersteiner lives in Washington, D.C., where he consults for non-profits by day and writes the Sam’s Good Meats column at www.hypervocal.com by night. He is from Kansas City and would always rather be eating KC barbecue.

Nine years ago, after the birth of my first son meant that I was responsible for the nutrition of another life form, I began educating myself on the reasons to eat organic, local, and grass-fed. “You better not mess this up” was the sign that flashed above every jar of baby food. Our family of four goes through two dozen eggs a week, and my fingers are numb from sorting through the options in the egg case. Should I buy the brand-name, all-natural, vegetarian-fed, cage- and antibiotic-free, omega-3-enriched eggs, or the store brand organic version that doesn’t boast omega-3s? The nutrition fact panels on both cartons are identical.

Between choosing the source and trying to calculate which eggs offer the most bang for the buck, I was having, as a friend called it, an eggsistential crisis.

I decided to let a laboratory solve my dilemma. I would simply compare the nutritional content on each egg carton—conventional, cage-free, free-range, organic, and pastured—then weigh those findings against price, environmental, and humane considerations, all of which would lead me to the perfect egg. Simple, right?

Not really. The nutrition content of eggs fluctuates from hen to hen, farm to farm, season to season. Those labels on the carton? They are calculated from eggs from multiple conventional farms chosen at random around the United States. The USDA “pools” the contents of several dozen eggs from two geographically disparate locations—say, Washington state and Georgia—and tests the nutritional value of the entire pool. The combined findings from dozens of different sites end up on the nutrition fact panel, which becomes mandatory labeling for any commercial egg, regardless of type or origin.

So absent an independent nutritional analysis of each egg you eat (about $800 per egg), it’s nearly impossible to know what exactly is inside the shell. It is heavily influenced by what the hen eats.

Chickens are natural omnivores that forage for grasses, worms, bugs, and all manner of grains. At least, that is the diet of hens raised in a pasture. Hens raised in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) receive their meals on a conveyor belt. It’s a grain-based “mash” formulated from corn, soy, and supplements. Cage-free and some free-ranging hens are often given the same mash, which—unless it’s organic—can include antibiotics, pesticides, genetically modified grains, and animal byproducts. But pastured hens fill up on grass and bugs, and consume less of whatever mash they are given.

That gives their eggs a leg up, nutritionally speaking. A 2009 study at Penn State found that pastured hens’ eggs had significantly higher amounts of omega-3s and vitamins E and lower omega-6s than their mash-only counterparts. Mother Earth News showed similarly increased levels of omega-3, vitamins A and E, as well as a third less cholesterol, in a 2007 study.

Ken Anderson, a poultry scientist at North Carolina State University who works with the Egg Nutrition Council, conducted his own study in 2010. He also found increased omega-3 and vitamin A and E levels in pastured eggs, but, he says, not enough to merit the claim that they’re “more nutritious.” Advocates of caged-egg production say they can replicate the nutritional content of pastured eggs by manipulating feed.

Companies such as Eggland’s Best provide proprietary formulas to their franchisees; these production houses then turn out cartons with the Eggland’s Best brand and promise an egg with added health benefits. In addition to a handful of nutritional supplements, Pennsylvania- based Sauder’s Gold brand eggs adds marigold petals to its feed to yield a yolk that mimics the school bus-orange of a pastured egg, which obtains its color naturally from beta carotene in grass.

So the decision, it seems, is bounced back to the consumer: Do you prefer whole foods in their closest-to-natural form, or would you rather get your nutrition in scientifically formulated doses? Consider, too, the husbandry practices associated with raising hens, one of the great polarizing aspects of the egg debate. On one side are farmers who believe hens should be allowed to stretch their wings, roam freely and forage because it’s not only better for the health of the chicken and the environment, but also yields a better product for human consumption.

Then there are proponents of CAFOs who say that efficient egg production is necessary to meet the needs of a population that’s “addicted to chewing and swallowing food,” says Chad Gregory of the United Egg Producers, a lobbying organization for the egg industry. Gregory asserts that demand can only be met with factory-level efficiency, and to suggest otherwise is to deprive the egg-eating public of a cheap protein source.

Economical it may be, but it’s pretty easy even for the most value-minded consumer to be turned off by a caged-hen facility. A quick Internet search reveals plenty of footage of overcrowded battery cages dripping with feces and chicken workers wearing hazmat suits to protect themselves from the ammonia fumes and general squalor. Anyone who’s driven by an industrial chicken farm knows the telltale stench.

Even in the most pristine houses, current regulations require only 67 square inches of space per hen, with five to seven hens to a cage. Cages can be stacked 10 high, and feces and urine drop through the wire floors of the cages, hopefully onto conveyor belts where they’re removed from the facility and stored for composting (but it often ends up on other chickens). Beaks are clipped to prevent chickens from pecking each other to death.

The American Egg Board is trying to change that image through its Good Egg Project. Spurred by California’s Prop 2, a statute that prohibits confining farm animals in a way that prevents them from freely turning around, lying down, standing up, and fully extending their limbs, the Egg Board is working with the Humane Society to establish a new nationwide standard for chicken cages. These “enriched colony cages” will offer 127 square inches per bird, as well as areas to perch, peck, scratch and nest. Birds will still be confined to cages throughout their entire lives and beaks will still be clipped. Eggs from these facilities will cost an extra 2 to 3 cents per egg.

There is a growing demand for cage-free eggs. Cage-free facilities are less chicken-dense than CAFOs and hens can roam freely within a shed, but they are never exposed to the outdoors. Excrement is cleaned out of the barn between flock rotations, about once every 18 months. And there are other problems: Scott Akom of Glenwood Farms, a large-scale egg production and processing plant in Jetersville, Va., who raises both caged and cage-free hens, says free-walking chickens sometimes pile up in the corners of their confined space and suffocate each other.

Some industry proponents claim hens prefer the safety and warmth of confinement to the outdoors. Mark Kastel of the Cornucopia Institute, a consumer watchdog, rejects that notion.

“That’s bullsh*t. When I visit well-managed free-range farms, I see hens running, flapping their wings, clucking…I can only describe it as joyful. When the farmer opens the door to the mobile hen house in the mornings, birds come pouring out like a fire hose.”

Given the nutritional benefits and apparent preference of the chickens, why aren’t all hens pastured? The process is more expensive, labor intensive, harder to control, and at the mercy of the weather, explains Polyface Farm’s Joel Salatin, a godfather of the pastured egg movement.

Pastured eggs are hand-gathered and inspected. There is more flock loss to predators. Hens still need to be fed supplemental mash, and organic and soy-free feed is nearly twice as expensive as its genetically engineered counterpart. All of these costs and variables are reflected in the price, but no one is getting rich selling pastured eggs. Says Flavor director of photography Molly Peterson, also a farmer at Mount Vernon Farms in Sperryville, Va.: “We charge what it costs us to produce these eggs.”

“Who told us that our food is supposed to be cheap to begin with?” asks Forrest Pritchard of Smith Meadows farm in Berryville, Va. Cheap is clearly a relative term, but even at farmers market prices, a two-egg breakfast costs less than a dollar. Pritchard’s eggs are 39.5 cents each—less than the cost of one Safeway banana.

For those who are of the “pay the farmer, not the doctor” mindset, pastured eggs are a small investment in hedging their bets. Carole Morison, a former industrial chicken farmer who left after she was disgusted by the system, is turning her 14 acres in Maryland into a pastured-egg farm that was recently certified by Animal Welfare Approved. “I’d rather skip buying a soda or a candy bar,” says Morison, “and spend that extra dollar on my eggs.”

Matt O’Hayer of Texas-based Vital Farms, a pastured-egg organization that coordinates 14 farms around the country, borrows a line from Michael Pollan in his own eating philosophy: “Spend more, eat less, but eat better food.”

One manager of a commercial facility that houses 480,000 hens said he’d choose a cage-free brown, organic egg for his own breakfast.

“This is a spiritual decision that we make,” says Kastel. “We used to say grace and be thankful for the food we have. Now food is all around us, and we’ve lost that connection.”

“At the end of the day, we make our decisions based on faith,” says Salatin. “Who do you trust? I put my faith in historical normalcy and a habitat that allows a chicken to fully express her chickenness. If she can’t do that, I assume the disrespect will manifest itself in compromised quality.”

As a mother and a consumer, it’s both my job and my right to inform myself, choose what makes the most sense to me, and vote with my wallet.

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How do you know where your grocery store eggs come from?

Read the side of the box: you’ll find the name of the distributor as well as a code for the farm or hen house of origin. Take that information and hit the Web or call the number provided. Ask if you can visit the farm; if they say no, you might want to reconsider buying their eggs. You can also look to third-party consumer watchdogs like the Cornucopia Institute, whose aim is to ensure that organic operations are meeting the letter of the law. Their guide to organic eggs can be found at www.cornucopia.org/organic-egg-scorecard.

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But how do they taste?

For some people, it’s all about the performance on the plate. We conducted our own double-blind taste test using conventional, cage-free organic, and pastured eggs. Chef/owners Grant Clifton and Russ Testa of Your Chef’s Table, a D.C.-area catering company dedicated to helping people learn how to cook with local, seasonal ingredients, prepared a breakfast of fried eggs, spinach scrambled eggs, country hash, fresh fruit, and grilled bread for our panel of seven judges. Our judges ranged in age from six to 44; their knowledge of eggs ran from novice to expert.  We gathered in the learning kitchen at Smith Center for Healing and the Arts, a non-profit organization that promotes whole-health education. Here’s what our tasters thought.

EGG #1:
Pastured, Mount Vernon Farm
42.5 cents per egg
Several people on our panel recognized these right away as “farmer’s market eggs,” describing them as having a “dense,” “tender,” “flavorful” white and a “buttery, rich yolk” that “stood up nicely.” With a bright orange yolk, “creamy mouth-feel,” and “full flavor,” this egg ranked as everyone’s favorite.

EGG #2:
Conventional, Glenwood Farms
19 cents per egg
The yolk was deemed “runnier” with “less muscle” than #1, and the “not as fluffy” white tasted “good, not great.” Our 6-year-old judge noted that this one had “a little less flavor,” which was echoed in the tasting notes of five out of the other six panelists. A few on the panel ranked this as their second-favorite.

EGG #3:
Cage-Free Organic, Whole Foods Brand
27 cents per egg
This egg was also deemed “flatter” in flavor than #1, with a “loose, bland” white and a “flabbier,” “oozier” yolk, although they said it had decent flavor. In terms of overall appeal, our panel didn’t distinguish much between eggs 2 and 3, evaluating this egg as “average,” and “what they would expect from a grocery store egg.”

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What’s in a name?
How to make sense of all the marketing on the outside of an egg carton? Other than the mandatory nutrition fact panel, it’s all up to the company that’s selling the eggs. Here are some commonly used terms:

USDA Organic: A nationwide regulated term; eggs must meet certain standards set by the National Organic Program in regard to animal welfare, feed, and outdoor access. A full explanation can be found through their website: www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/nop

Non-GMO: Feed contains no genetically modified organisms.

Brown eggs vs. white eggs: Brown eggs come from brown hens; white eggs come from white hens; it’s the way that the hens are raised and what they eat that makes the difference as to what’s inside the shell.

Cage-Free: A USDA-regulated term. Birds are not caged but are housed inside facilities with no outdoor access.

Free-Range: An unregulated term indicating that hens have had access to the outdoors, but there is no specification to the quality, duration, or amount of space they’re afforded.

All-Natural: Usually refers to the feed. No antibiotics, animal byproducts, or other chemicals, but because it might contain GMOs, it’s not necessarily organic.

Vegetarian-Fed: No animal byproducts in the hens’ diet.

Farm Fresh, Country Fresh: Meaningless marketing lingo; eggs are probably from a caged hen.

Soy-free: Also refers to the feed.

Omega-3 enriched: Hens are fed omega-3 supplements, like flax, seaweed, fish oils, or algae. Some pastured hens’ eggs will also be labeled as having high omega-3.

Certified Humane, Animal Welfare Approved, American Humane Certified: Eggs have met the standards of third-party certification groups. Standards vary.

Adrienne Wichard-Edds lives with her family of egg-lovers in Arlington, Virginia. She, however, only eats eggs in quiche and cake.

Ris Lacoste is on a mission to find local scallops for her restaurant’s signature Scallops Margarita.  There’s one condition: they must be as good as the New Bedford scallops she uses now, or she won’t make the substitution.

Taste and quality take precedence over strict adherence to the local mantra at Ris in Washington’s West End. Fortunately, it gets easier every day to find high-quality products. Still, going local is a work in progress, more complex than making one call to a large distributor. “I keep trying to do something about it every day,” said Lacoste, who opened Ris in December 2009, after years of getting rave notices in other people’s places, like 1789 in Georgetown and the late, lamented 21 Federal. Ris was an instant hit because the food is familiar but has an intensity of flavor that makes it memorable.

Lacoste calls her rustic modern restaurant “a classy neighborhood joint where the bar is always full and I know everyone. The neighbors are comfortable here.”

And so is everyone else.

The tables are far enough apart, the service smooth, and while diners can sometimes hear the siren of an ambulance on its way to the nearby hospital, they feel cosseted and safe, a reflection of the owner’s warm, embracing personality.

The menu, 75 percent of which is local in the warmer months, is sophisticated comfort food. It’s not your grandmother’s chicken pot pie, and no one ever made a butterscotch pudding quitelike the one at Ris.

All of it reflects a distillation of Lacoste’s French Canadian roots, her New England upbringing, her French culinary training, and her extensive experience that began when she planted her first watermelon seed as a child and was so excited when it sprouted she pulled it up to show her mother. No watermelon that year.

By the time she was 12 she was working in a Polish deli; by 17 she was an assistant manager at a local restaurant. Voted most likely to succeed in high school, she went to college where her name changed from Doris to Ris. She studied pre-med for two years and then transferred to Berkeley, graduating with a degree in French while acting as an assistant manager at the Berkeley Faculty Club. Off to Paris to study French with barely a sou, she thought she could earn enough money as an au pair while she studied. Instead she became a part-time typist at La Varenne, Paris’ well-known cooking school, and was soon able to attend classes in exchange for being the receptionist. Her fate was sealed.

Her interest in local ingredients came early, when she worked in Boston and discovered the joys—and quality—of local seafood. “Once you got swordfish out the back door, you just can’t buy Chilean sea bass,” she said. “I fell in love with the notion of knowing the people who are growing my food. I love hunting down ingredients,” but laments the lack of time now that she is running a restaurant. What buying from dozens of suppliers means is “writing 1,000 checks instead of 20.” And often paying more. It’s worth it to Lacoste because the money stays in the community.

But she is not from the mold that it must be local at any cost. So Muscovy ducks comes from California because she hasn’t found any to equal them here. She refuses to limit her cheese plate to local products. She flies in fresh wild salmon in season. And if there are asparagus on the menu, it must be spring. Steaks, burgers, pork, and chicken are local year-round but Lacoste said that she hasn’t found an egg person and she doesn’t know who to trust with grass-fed beef. “I’m not there yet. There are certainly struggles that come along with this.”

One relatively new source of information about local food is realtimefarms.com, a website that provides information about local farms and other sources for raw ingredients and allows the user to ask questions.“It’s a way for my staff to make entries and see how important what they order is, and get excited about what they are buying,” Lacoste explained. “It’s very interactive. One of the toughest things is to convince your staff that it’s worth it to buy locally even though it is time consuming. I give them books to read, like Michael Pollan. It’s like teaching, and at the same time I am teaching myself.”

Shopping at the farmers markets also helps. Year round she’s at the Dupont Circle market every Sunday. In the growing season she adds three or four others.

“My food is providing people with soul and spirit and the best food I can feed them and is good for them,” Lacoste said, hastily adding: “Healthy does not mean I’m not serving butter.”

The world of sustainable ag has noticed Ris. It received the Snail of Approval award from Slow Foods, a non-profit gastronomic organization founded to counteract fast food and fast life, and the disappearance of local food traditions. And oh, yes, swirling in larger and larger circles in Lacoste’s head is a new restaurant. “Once your restaurant is organized your creative juices begin to flow, you want to do something else,” she said. “There is an addiction.”

Ris
2275 L Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20037
website

Marian Burros was on staff at The New York Times for 27 years and still writes for them. She has lived in the Washington area since 1959 and remembers when there were no farmers markets. At one time or other, she worked for The Washington Post and the late lamented Washington Star and Washington Daily News. She was also a consumer reporter for D.C.’s WRC-TV. The author of 13 cookbooks, she has been writing about small farms and the pleasures of local food since the 1980s.