The Local Food Network
A lawn, strange trip
I'm not eating my lawn; it just tastes like it.
Today is the first day of actually embarking on the Localvore Challenge after a couple of weeks of thinking about it and a weekend of hunting up foodstuffs that have traveled less than 100 miles to our table.
I'm eating lunch at my desk as I write this, and the Cabot-cheddar-on-homemade-bread sandwich is delicious. The salad greens are another story. The greens themselves - some from the farmers market, some from neighbors' gardens - taste fine, but the weekend shopping failed to turn up any of the usual toppings that make great greens into great salads, like tomatoes, peppers or cucumbers. The overall effect is good, but a little grassy, and the usual fallback of slathering the salad with Caesar dressing, croutons and Parmesan is out, because I have no idea where to find local dressing or Parmesan cheese.
And if I did, would it be Parmesan or parmesan? That capital letter is a big deal when you're discussing local foods. Countries and food regions around the world have trademarked local specialties. While you'll find some pretty decent sparkling wines made as close as the Finger Lakes region of New York using le méthode champenoise, only wine from the area of Champagne, France, can use the name on the label.
So is a hard, dry cow's milk cheese made in Vermont - assuming one exists - worthy of the name "parmesan," or should it be reserved for true Parmigiano-Reggianos from Parma and its neighboring provinces?
It's a big question for Vermont. The state is flirting with establishing rules governing the use of the word "Vermont" on food labels, because the name of the state is synonymous with quality foods across much of the continent. Letting anybody call something "Vermont" dilutes the brand.
But what's the cutoff? Should Vermont Coffee Co., headquartered in Bristol, but whose beans come from around the globe be allowed to use the name? Should it be reserved for 100 percent Vermont ingredients? Or should a cheese such as Cabot, a company in the state and which supports local dairies, but which also uses milk from New York and around New England, be allowed to use Vermont on its labeling? And where would you draw the line on "imported" ingredients? Should there be one set of rules for a product such as coffee, where there are no local growers, and another for cheese or maple syrup, where imported, "Vermont grown" and blended products are often indistinguishable? And what would Cabot cheddar be called if Cheddar, England, trademarked that name? Farfetched? Dutch dairies cannot call their briny white cheese "feta" in Europe since a 2005 court ruling in favor of the cheese's Greek homeland. It's enough to make your head spin.
For our family's localvore challenge, we're including Cabot (even if a small percentage of its milk comes from farther than 100 miles afield) because we had some in the fridge. We also bought some all-Vermont cheddar from the Grafton Village Cheese Co., in part symbolically for the challenge, in part because it, too, is great cheese.
So far, Day One has been pretty easy:
Breakfast: Toast with local butter and honey; yogurt and fresh strawberries and a glass of cider. No pain there, especially as my first mulligan is coffee. My second, which I hadn't counted on, is leavening such as yeast and baking powder for baked goods and pancakes. I had planned on red wine for my third and final import, but since lunch started, I'm leaning toward red wine vinegar. I'm also starting to wonder how many steps are between apple cider and cider vinegar and can I get them done in a week. Somehow I doubt it.
The breakfast toast is made with Gleason Grains' all-Vermont flour. My wife is the baker in the family and she's struggling to adjust to the difference between this flour and King Arthur, her usual. King Arthur, from Norwich, falls into the category of Vermont company, but out-of-state source materials. The bread today tastes great, but the first batch is a little denser than usual and our 3-year-old turned his nose up at it. He'll have to get used to it, because I expect we'll be eating a lot of it. Outside new potatoes, there's not a lot of starches produced around here right now.
Lunch: Bread, cheese and, errr, salad.
Dinner: Roasted local chicken, potatoes and another helping of lawn. My kingdom for a vinaigrette!
Today is the first day of actually embarking on the Localvore Challenge after a couple of weeks of thinking about it and a weekend of hunting up foodstuffs that have traveled less than 100 miles to our table.
I'm eating lunch at my desk as I write this, and the Cabot-cheddar-on-homemade-bread sandwich is delicious. The salad greens are another story. The greens themselves - some from the farmers market, some from neighbors' gardens - taste fine, but the weekend shopping failed to turn up any of the usual toppings that make great greens into great salads, like tomatoes, peppers or cucumbers. The overall effect is good, but a little grassy, and the usual fallback of slathering the salad with Caesar dressing, croutons and Parmesan is out, because I have no idea where to find local dressing or Parmesan cheese.
And if I did, would it be Parmesan or parmesan? That capital letter is a big deal when you're discussing local foods. Countries and food regions around the world have trademarked local specialties. While you'll find some pretty decent sparkling wines made as close as the Finger Lakes region of New York using le méthode champenoise, only wine from the area of Champagne, France, can use the name on the label.
So is a hard, dry cow's milk cheese made in Vermont - assuming one exists - worthy of the name "parmesan," or should it be reserved for true Parmigiano-Reggianos from Parma and its neighboring provinces?
It's a big question for Vermont. The state is flirting with establishing rules governing the use of the word "Vermont" on food labels, because the name of the state is synonymous with quality foods across much of the continent. Letting anybody call something "Vermont" dilutes the brand.
But what's the cutoff? Should Vermont Coffee Co., headquartered in Bristol, but whose beans come from around the globe be allowed to use the name? Should it be reserved for 100 percent Vermont ingredients? Or should a cheese such as Cabot, a company in the state and which supports local dairies, but which also uses milk from New York and around New England, be allowed to use Vermont on its labeling? And where would you draw the line on "imported" ingredients? Should there be one set of rules for a product such as coffee, where there are no local growers, and another for cheese or maple syrup, where imported, "Vermont grown" and blended products are often indistinguishable? And what would Cabot cheddar be called if Cheddar, England, trademarked that name? Farfetched? Dutch dairies cannot call their briny white cheese "feta" in Europe since a 2005 court ruling in favor of the cheese's Greek homeland. It's enough to make your head spin.
For our family's localvore challenge, we're including Cabot (even if a small percentage of its milk comes from farther than 100 miles afield) because we had some in the fridge. We also bought some all-Vermont cheddar from the Grafton Village Cheese Co., in part symbolically for the challenge, in part because it, too, is great cheese.
So far, Day One has been pretty easy:
Breakfast: Toast with local butter and honey; yogurt and fresh strawberries and a glass of cider. No pain there, especially as my first mulligan is coffee. My second, which I hadn't counted on, is leavening such as yeast and baking powder for baked goods and pancakes. I had planned on red wine for my third and final import, but since lunch started, I'm leaning toward red wine vinegar. I'm also starting to wonder how many steps are between apple cider and cider vinegar and can I get them done in a week. Somehow I doubt it.
The breakfast toast is made with Gleason Grains' all-Vermont flour. My wife is the baker in the family and she's struggling to adjust to the difference between this flour and King Arthur, her usual. King Arthur, from Norwich, falls into the category of Vermont company, but out-of-state source materials. The bread today tastes great, but the first batch is a little denser than usual and our 3-year-old turned his nose up at it. He'll have to get used to it, because I expect we'll be eating a lot of it. Outside new potatoes, there's not a lot of starches produced around here right now.
Lunch: Bread, cheese and, errr, salad.
Dinner: Roasted local chicken, potatoes and another helping of lawn. My kingdom for a vinaigrette!
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