(Host)
For the past ten years, there has been a renewed interest in the
growing, preparing and preserving of local food. Commentator Ron Krupp
is a gardener and author who tells us more about this Retro Food
movement and where it’s heading.
(Krupp) The Mad River Localvore
Project began in the Mad River Valley six years ago. More than 250
people signed up for the first Eat Local Challenge. The participants
realized it wasn’t going to be a piece of cake since there was no local
flour, eggs or butter.
Since that time, the food scene has
changed dramatically in the Mad River Valley. Walk into many grocery
stores and you can find Red Hen’s Cyrus Pringle bread, made from 100
percent Vermont grown wheat. Red Hen owner Randy George worked with
Addison County grain grower Tom Kenyon to grow a wheat that would be
suitable for bread making. Now there’s an abundance of meat and
vegetables in the Mad River Valley at farmers’ markets and local farm
stands. Restaurant chefs serve chicken from local farms and fresh salad
greens throughout the year. There’s a community orchard and local apple
cider vinegar. Cheese, butter and eggs are available.
There’s
another local food initiative – called the Slow Food Movement – where
local ingredients are prepared from scratch. Slow Food was born in 1986
when its founder, Italian Carlo Petrini, protested against the
construction of a McDonald’s in Rome – with a bowl of local pasta. Slow
Food has grown into a network of 100,000 members in 153 countries.
The
New York Times Magazine once described the Slow Food Movement as a
"gastronomical version of Greenpeace: a defiant determination to
preserve unprocessed food from being wiped off the map."
In the
United States, the interest in retro-food has involved support for
food sources ranging from Najaho-Churro sheep, America ‘s earliest
domesticated farm animal, to the Green Mountain potato, developed by the
University of Vermont in the 1880’s.
The Slow Food movement in
Burlington meets once a month on Sunday evenings with potluck suppers.
A recent theme was Russian food which included a poor man’s caviar
composed of mushrooms, nuts, onions, cilantro and peppers – along with a
cheesecake made of fresh Vermont buttermilk, ground almonds, butter,
farmers’ cheese, lemon, spices and eggs. The meal also featured plenty
of vodka and a plum cordial.
Some seventy years ago, many
Vermont farm families lived off the land. They had large gardens, a milk
cow and barrels full of fresh and hard cider and vinegar. They raised
chickens, pigs, sheep and steers. Glass jars of preserves, pickles and
tomatoes lined the shelves of root cellars. Before refrigerators and
ice-boxes, there were small ice houses in shaded north-facing slopes
filled with sawdust and large blocks of ice for preserving food. Today,
many of those old ways seem new again.