Rachel's challenge

Eat only local foods for one week (and learn to cook while doing it). Also follow Michael Pollan's dictum in his latest book Food Rules: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”

Activities for the week

Shopping trip to Whole Foods, Cedar Center: Whole Foods at Cedar Center in University Heights was my first shopping stop for local foods. While offering a different experience than a farmers’ market, Whole Foods has a good amount of local items. Additionally, the store has an accessible location and accessible hours. I was able to buy basic items I needed for the upcoming week—vegetables, eggs, cheese, etc. Although, the price of organic, local products is higher than mass produced foods, I knew I was getting a better quality product. However, the price did motivate me to make one zucchini or one tomato go a long way! Overall, Whole Foods was a nice resource. I could easily get there if I forgot to pick something up at the farmers’ market, or if I ran out of an ingredient. Additionally the Cedar Center Whole Foods is now a Fresh Stop CSA Pick-up.

Shopping trip to Tremont Farmers’ Market, Tremont: One day, after work, I took a trip to the Tremont Farmers’ Market at Lincoln Park. My meals needed another focus besides zucchini, as I was fresh out of ideas for how to prepare that vegetable. In its fifth season, the Tremont Market has a fun atmosphere. There was live music, and the vendors were chatting with new customers and catching up with veteran market goers. I went home with one pound of ground chuck, two apples and six potato, jalapeño, cheddar pierogies. I also was able to sit down with Jody Lathwell, Manager of the Tremont Farmers’ Market later that week. She explained the simple application farmers fill out to sell at the Market. Jody and her colleagues then decide whether or not the applicant fits into the market at that particular time. For example, Jody will ask a question like “can the market handle another vegetable farmer?” In order to ensure the longevity of the Tremont Market, it takes a percentage of each vendor’s sales with a minimum of five dollars. Above all, Jody strives to maintain the integrity of the Tremont Market by keeping it a local producer’s market with no re-sold items available for purchase. “Markets are not just about food,” Jody told me. “Market means community.”

Meal at Lucky’s Café, Tremont: At the end of the week I was able to swing by Lucky’s Café for an early lunch. The restaurant sources almost all of its food locally—even out of their own backyard garden! I had seen Food Network’s Guy Fieri speechless after a bite out Lucky’s Rueben sandwich, and I wanted to try it out for myself. Chef Heather Haviland and her staff make every piece (except for the Swiss cheese) of the sandwich from scratch—the sauerkraut, the bread, the corned beef and the catsup for the dressing. “We slow braise kraut in the basement for two weeks—that’s kickin’ it old school!” Heather said. She explained that  since women have joined the workforce the tradition of food has suffered. Instead of being responsible for just the home, women also became responsible for their workplace, and (because men are not yet picking up the slack) the focus of food became “anything instant.” Now, Heather wants to bring food back to square one. And Heather’s got the right idea because kickin’ it old school is delicious. The Rueben was, far and away, the best sandwich I have ever eaten.

Meal at Great Lakes Brewing Company’s Brewpub, Ohio City: I had the pleasure of devouring a meal prepared by Richard Basich, the local foods chef at the Brewing Company’s Brewpub. The meal began with a salad bursting with natural flavor—basil, chives, mint, fennel—lightly covered in a lemon dressing. Richard purposefully used the dressing sparingly. He told me that using more would have compromised the salad’s intended fresh flavor. The main course was a flank steak raised on the company’s spent brewery grain at a local farm. The steak was served with onions, mint pesto and zucchini fries as a side dish. The meal was unbelievably tasty and rich. About cooking with local, organic foods Richard said, “[Local] vegetables are really different. When you hold them they feel delicate—like plants. If you have a local zucchini, your fingernails could put holes in it. Any other zucchini you could throw against the wall and nothing would happen.”

Visit to urban farm, Cleveland: I visited urban farmer, Molly Murray, at her farm and home on Columbus Road. This is Molly’s first season, and she is experiencing many of the trials and successes of a first-time, urban farmer. To get started Molly took an Ohio State University Extension class called Market Gardening Training Course that provided information about starting a business and dense planting strategies. But there is no real education like getting in the urban soil and planting. So far, Molly has a laundry list of small ways to improve her farm for next season: “Watch out for groundhogs,” she told me, “and water garlic more.” But overall her experience has been rewarding, especially the support she is receiving from family and the urban-farmer community. Her words of wisdom to new farmers: “[farming] takes a lot of time—be ready to invest time, but it redeems itself. It’s exciting.”  Follow Molly through the seasons on her blog.

Lessons learned

My biggest lesson was learned on pierogi night.  I bought six Posh Pierogies from the Tremont Farmers’ Market. When I got home, I was lucky to find out that my brother, Jason, was also making pierogies, but not Posh, local pierogies. He was making Mrs. T’s Pierogies from the freezer. It looked like we had an experiment on our hands: Jason and I would both make our pierogies at the same time and prepare them the same way and compare. The first noticeable difference was the price. I paid $5 for six pierogies and Jason paid $2.50 for a box of twelve (half the price for double the amount). Secondly, the pierogies had different ingredients. The first ingredient in my dumplings was “potatoes, hand peeled,” while the first ingredient in Jason’s pierogies was water, and after that, flour, and finally, after that, dehydrated potatoes. But the most astonishing difference between the pierogies was, of course, the taste. After the piergoies were finished cooking Jason had a bite of my Posh Pierogies and promptly said, “Wow, that’s so…natural.” At first, I assumed that my younger brother was making fun of me. In my head I heard sarcasm: “Amazing, Rachel. Did you just dig this pierogi out of the ground? It tastes organic, environmental and sustainable!” But to my surprise, he really meant it. “That actually tastes like potato, cheddar and jalapeño,” he said. “Not that my pierogies aren’t good,” Jason clarified, “but they’re good in a way that is heavily whipped and vaguely reminiscent of potatoes and cheese.” If you cut the local pierogie in half you could physically see each ingredient—potato, cheese and jalapeño. The filling in the Mrs. T’s Piergoies looked like white mush. My local pierogies were better, plain and simple. They were tastier, more satisfying, more filling and less watered down. The expense was worth it—for five dollars I ate like a queen.

Quick tips from the experts

Tips for cooking and eating locally from Morgan Taggart, OSU Extension and the Cleveland -Cuyahoga County Food Policy Coalition:

• Have flexibility in what you eat because what you eat will change seasonally.

• Have flexibility in menu planning, based on what is available from the harvest.

• Be prepared for surprises. Mother Nature is in charge.

• Good cooking skills are helpful because “you are working with raw, unprocessed foods. You might have eggplant every day of the week, and at some point you might say, ‘What else can I do with eggplant?’”

Tips for restaurateurs going local from Saul Kliorys, Environmental Programs Coordinator, Great Lakes Brewing Company:

• Be aware of what customers like. To chefs, holes in lettuce indicates that no pesticides were used during the farming process, but to customers, lettuce with holes is unappealing and inedible.

• Teach cooks the “value of simplicity.” Restaurant cooks will have to learn to cook without jeopardizing the taste of the produce itself.

• Presentation counts. Presenting food the way it looks when it comes out of the ground reminds the customer that what they are eating is from the Earth.

• Encourage servers to talk about the special nature of the food they are serving.

Biggest thrill

Taking a bite into a flank steak from the Great Lakes Brewing Company’s Brewpub.

Biggest embarrassment

My first meal of local foods week was cabbage. I like cabbage—raw, pure, unadulterated cabbage. So a lunch of raw cabbage and radishes didn’t seem so bad. I once forced a friend to challenge me to eat a half head of cabbage, just so that I could have some viable reason to eat a half-head of cabbage. But this wasn’t children’s fodder, this was my meal, and it was terrible. After that I realized that I needed to do some careful planning. I needed to think about my food or else my week would look a lot like a raw cabbage.

Best advice for beginners

You don’t have to be an experienced chef to prepare local foods. Take each recipe one step at a time and remember, as Heather Haviland says, “The first ingredient is intentions.”

How Cleveland can improve

Local foods were very accessible to me, but I live one mile from a Whole Foods and I have a car. There are many people in our region that have little or no access to fresh, local produce. “There are some places in the inner city where the average income for a family is $11,000 a year,” Morgan Taggart told me. “It makes you think twice about cultural perceptions of food. Sometimes people don’t have a stove, maybe just a plug-in hot plate,” she continued. However, there are initiatives in place to help close the food gap. The Food Policy Coalition is using RTA to promote the purchase of local foods. Brochures are now available on buses that inform people how to get to local food markets with public transportation and highlight stores that accept food subsidies (like Tremont Farmers’ Market). Morgan is hopeful; she has seen much more interest in eating local in the last seven years. “No markets took food stamps six years ago, now there are six,” she said. “We went from one producer market at Shaker Square, now there are 12.  There were 40 new community gardens in Cleveland last year, and attendance is out of control at our canning and freezing workshops.” Although, Cleveland has made a lot of progress, still only 1% of its food is localized. Currently the Food Policy Coalition is involved in a  regional food study, to be completed in November, that assesses a hypothetical Cleveland where 25% of food is localized. How would the infrastructure have to change? What kinds of jobs would be created? What kind of improvements would there be in the local economy? When all is said and done Morgan tells me, “I often wonder if this local food thing is a fad or here to stay? Are we actually changing our culture?”

Helpful resources

• The Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Food Policy Coalition 
• Ohio State University Extension Urban Agriculture Program 
• allrecipies.com for beginner cooks 
• Whole Foods Market: Natural and Organic Grocery Store 
• Mustard Seed Market & Cafe
• GreenCityBlueLake food section--be sure to chek out their listing of Northeast Ohio farmers' market.  There is one everyday of the week!
• Local Food Cleveland 
• Food Rules by Michael Pollan
• North Union Farmers' Market