A week on food grown in New York City
Back in March, I wrote a series of articles about eating locally-produced foods, thinking it deplorable that much of our food travelled thousands of kilometres to get to us, and that even Highliner was processing in China the fish caught off our coast.
I thought of that again this past week, down in Barrington, where you can buy freshly-caught scallops from a truck beside the road, throw them in a hot pan with butter and a bit of lemon juice, sear them briefly, and dine like a king. I talked with a Cape Island lobster fisherman named David Atkinson who affirmed that the ones in the stores bear no resemblance whatsoever to truly fresh scallops.
The local food movement has taken off. During the summer, the Chronicle Herald published a front-page feature article on the origins of our food, noting that even the apple juice we drink is likely to have come from concentrate produced in China. Small wonder that you always see people peering at the fine print on labels in grocery stores, looking for food that not only has been produced near here, but can be bought with some confidence in the standards under which it has been produced.
The provincial government, in a smart move, has been making it easier to identify local food by introducing a bright logo that stores can put with food grown, caught or produced in this area. The logo is a rising sun with the words Select Nova Scotia underneath, and it's on signs placed near food from this province.
I've written in the past about efforts of people to eat only food produced within a certain radius of their homes, including about a guy who wanted to spend a year eating only stuff that he bought at the Halifax Farmers' Market. Now, every time you turn around, there is a story about a similar experiment, with even celebrities like the writer Barbara Kingsolver producing books about living a year on food produced by she and her family.
Now, Adam Gopnik has written about a week spent living on food grown in New York City. It had to happen. Gopnik, who grew up in Montreal while his parents taught at McGill University, writes for the New Yorker, which produced a recent issue devoted entirely to food. (Another article in the same issue was by a woman who says you are what you don't eat, all about going to a spa and fasting, plus undertaking colonic hydrotherapy, which is a process you'd best avoid.)
Gopnik ranged around New York, finding places in the Bronx where chickens were raised, abandoned plots taken over for the growing of vegetables, small farms on Staten Island run by Italian immigrants who missed tilling the soil, and honey raised on skyscraper rooftops. He took his children on a foraging expedition through Central Park with a man called Wildman Steve Brill, finding wood sorrel, mushrooms, field garlic and lamb's quarters.
He even found fish. Gopnik visited Brooklyn College, where there is a tilapia fish farming program, taking home some nice fillets. He wrote that tilapia, a fish that I first noticed in local supermarkets a couple of years ago, is the easiest fish of all to raise, since it is a warm water fish that eats simple, vegetation-based food. Salmon, on the other hand, are carnivorous and require much more food than that gotten from the salmon itself.
To cap the week off, Adam Gopnik and his family sat down to a feast of local food, including Bronx chicken with Staten Island peppers, an exotic tagine (Moroccan stew) made with the tilapia, a pot of green beans, turnip puree enriched by elephant dung from the Bronx zoo, plus a Brooklyn arugula salad. Gopnik mused that the point of localism was to encourage sustainable agriculture by eating things that don't have to be shipped halfway around the world, guzzling fossil fuels, to get to your table. He also mentioned what was called the Marco Polo exemption, where it was permissible to use certain exotic spices and olive oil.
He did reasonable well – for a week. In Nova Scotia, the possibilities are almost endless. We have produce from the Annapolis Valley, fish from the sea, meat from our farms, and fruit from our bushes and trees. Things not available during the growing season can be preserved for use in other months.
The more we seek out local food, the more the message will be delivered that we insist on good food, and our reliance on distant countries for something so essential to our existence will lessen.
- Tom Sheppard can be reached at twsheppard@gmail.com
