Relish

As I think Spiderman’s uncle put it to young Peter Parker, “with great power comes great numbers of people kvetching and whining at you.” It was something like that. So it is with the Zeusian authority we wield in naming the Restaurant of the Year, which will appear in the forthcoming October issue. Our annual selection is staggering in its implications, bathing the chosen establishment in beatific rays of gold, conferring the status of instant legend. It also kick-starts the grousing. Usually and understandably, I hear from readers unhappy because I didn’t choose their faves. Owners or managers of overlooked restaurants write a lot of complaining letters. You can always tell because they begin, “I’m not the owner or manager of…” A couple of years ago, a reader took me to task for a different reason. She didn’t like my choice because, for her, “the first criteria” for selecting a “best” restaurant “should be if they buy local.” She adds, “First and foremost, to be a top restaurant, it should be a given that the ingredients are…as locally raised as possible.”

Silly me. Silly you. Our first criteria for a top restaurant would probably be that it puts good food on the plate. That separates us from those who like to be called “locavores”—and that alone pretty much tells you all you need to know about them— who believe in the moral imperative (and the gustatory superiority, they toot, endlessly) of preferring locally grown foods. Their arguments are, to put it mildly, vague. It’s like Sean Penn laying out his blueprint for world peace on Oprah. It may sound good. Even Oprah’s audience, though, is smart enough to know if you pinned Penn down on details, the logic crumbles like day-old biscotti. The simple idiocy of the locavore’s position, clearly explained, is frightfully embarrassing. Missouri’s tuna stocks have been tragically depleted since the closing innings of the Silurian era, when the seas retreated around here and left us several hundred miles inland. So any St. Louis eatery with tuna on the menu is—or should be, according to locavore standards—off their list. Sadly, because of the predatory nature of the greedy, neocolonialist Big Fruit Industry, the potential for pineapple plantations has never been fully realised here in the Show-Me state. So cancel those locavore reservations to any Missouri restaurant serving piña coladas.

Let’s establish this right away: The preoccupation with “local” foods is, at best, like water in plastic bottles and unlikely, hypochondriacal food allergies, an upper middle-class fetish. Saddled with too much income and untethered by the discernments of a serious education, they roam the more barren plains of the cultural landscape, looking for any place that will offer them some sense of specialness. These are the same people who contribute money to combat clinical depression in polar bears. Or bring electricity to needy Amish. Those people who don’t have any kids of their own and who buy yours those stupid wooden craft fair toys as gifts? Likely locavores. Insisting on eating locally is an affectation, a posture. Locavores are the sorts who live in constant fear of being identified with the McRib-gobbling proletariat. Simultaneously, they disdain anything that might remotely connect them with privilege and upper class as a sign of their own progressive, anti-capitalist sensitivities. The dichotomy can be tough for them. How to be both a snob and one of the folks? Embrace local foods. On the one hand, insisting the squash in your butternut bisque comes from a local farm satisfies your self-identification with folksy “authenticity.” On the other, disdaining a cassoulet because the pork wasn’t home-raised satisfies a need to distinguish your refined tastes from the real authentic folks, who buy carrots at the Wal-Mart Supercenter with nary a thought as to the terrior in which those veggies were grown. Locavores completely miss the irony in this, of course. Their kind so often does. Then again, we’re talking about Donovan and Olivia. Their condo walls are festooned with Indonesian masks and the folk-detritus of third-world cultures. Their yeasty, leftist, muffin-headed politics are iced with concerns for Amazonian tribesmen and freeing Tibet. Yet a serving of beets that didn’t come of age within five miles of the restaurant where it appears on a plate turns them into snooty chauvinists. Irrational hypocrisy isn’t a quirk for them; it’s a lifestyle.

Eco-smugness is not incidentally a popular currency in the realm of the locavore, even if it spends more poorly than photocopied Iranian rials in the real world. How, for instance, does plowing under St. Charles County meadows to grow green peppers put any fewer greasy fingerprints all over Ms. Earth’s best china when acreage for green peppers in Texas or Florida already exists, acreage that is more productive and with longer growing seasons than we have here? If, instead of using nearby wetlands for a casino, would locavores support a plan to excavate those same wetlands to make a local catfish farm?  And sure, it’s romantic to picture 10 local yeomen farmers, each tending to their own little 10 acre plots, and it feels good to contrast them to the soulless thousand-acre corporate farm hundreds of miles away. The locals use up far fewer “food miles” in getting their peppers to market as well, a favorite yardstick for the locavore. But remember: Each of those little 10-acre plots requires its own little tractor and irrigation system and other equipment, all of which use resources in their construction. And while agribusinesses can load a few thousand pounds of green peppers on a single big semi, each of those 10 local farmers drives his crop to the locavore’s beloved farmer’s market in 10 pickup trucks. Which don’t run on unicorn milk. Nope, they leave 10 separate carbon carpet stains on our planet’s Oriental rug.

Favoring “local ingredients” is, not coincidentally, a cheap way to establish the bona fides of your connoisseurship. You can look discriminating without doing all the hard work of knowing what to discriminate against. You don’t need to know if that cassoulet is in the Toulouse or the Castelnaudary style. All you have to do is peer at the menu and ask your waiter, Philippe, if the cassoulet’s Porky’s parts come from your zip code and poof: you’re a gourmet. And not just any gourmet. No, you’re a gourmet with a social conscience.

At worst, the fetish for local food is the mark of the culinary Luddite. These people fantasize about a halcyon age—one, of course, that never existed long after primitive man could stroll far enough to see other people who had food he didn’t and who quickly figured out how to trade for or steal it. They harken back to a fake past when the happy burghers ate only locally grown burgers. Europeans were netting cod off the coast of Newfoundland 500 years ago. Salted and dried, the fish showed up in Portugal, West Africa, and Brazil. There may have been a few local aficionados in those places who turned their noses up at the sight of foreign bacalao. Most 17th century consumers were happy, though, to have a source of affordable protein that was not worm-infested and smelled like last year’s socks. From the East’s exotic spices to sushi, people have always craved new, imported foods. Civilization and economic progress advanced on the platters of those who could afford importing foods that weren’t local. Appreciating foods from other places isn’t just a sign of cultural sophistication; it is a sign of advancing economic progress in our species.

But wait, wait, wait. The locavores are indignant. My characterizing of a demand for local food as posing by supercilious trendiste is, they insist, an argument made of straw—preferably a local and organically raised straw grown in sustainable fields and harvested with fair trade practises. Locavores are not insisting we eat only locally produced foods, they counter. Only those foods locally available and convenient. Of course, restaurants already do this. Restaurants working within the natural parameters of supply and demand will naturally get the best ingredients they can and pay as cheaply for them as they can. Yes, most restaurants will prefer local food when they can get it, since it will tend to be fresher and, with smaller transportation costs, cheaper. In July, few St. Louis chefs buy Chilean tomatoes. In December? The local tomato crop is thin around here then. Sure, we can tomato fast from September until next June if we wish. True tomato gourmets do just that. For those who want a tomato in our salad and who don’t mind the lesser quality of an import, they’re available. And there isn’t anything immoral about eating them.

If a restaurant doesn’t use a local food, it is usually because no local source can meet the demand, whether the food’s in season or not. We could turn every inch of St. Louis’ open space into a tomato patch, including the outfield at Busch Stadium, and we still couldn’t locally produce enough tomatoes for all of the Whoppers served here. So Burger King looks elsewhere. If you want only local tomatoes, you should do the same when it comes to considering a visit with the King for dinner. Restaurants also go afield for food because of specialty items. Unless your neighbor is the Hudson Valley duck farm or Niman Ranch, the best foie gras or apple wood smoked bacon isn’t going to be local. If you don’t want to patronize restaurants that carry those foods on the menu for that reason, fine. Leaves more for me.

A preoccupation with local foods, whether it’s sincere or just a posture, demonstrates a perverse snobbishness that doesn’t bring us closer to our food, as locavores and other food faddists tout. On the contrary, it actually removes people from the spectacular variety of food we can enjoy today. Little more than two centuries ago, entire villages of Indians in the American Northwest starved because of some glitch in the annual salmon run, the only normally reliable source of their protein. Little more than one century ago, shortages of fresh vegetables meant serious vitamin deficiencies for people who really did have to rely on local produce. Nebraskan pioneers were living on the largely “self-sustaining” farms that fire the imaginations of the locavore. And come February, they’d have probably traded the whole, snow-encrusted farm for some ripe bananas. Maintaining sources of food that are not centralized makes economic sense and it makes us healthier. 

Well, we don’t live any more in environments where sustenance is the major reason for eating, sniff the locavores. Exactly. And that is part of their problem. We live in a world in which food and the choices we make in eating it can be considered something like fashion accessories. We can play at being locavores.

Last summer, a neighbor’s kid refused to eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches his mother made at the condo they were renting in Florida. The bread, he insisted, wasn’t the same as at home. Local food preferences are exasperating in a child. Fortunately, most kids outgrow them. Too bad the locavores probably won’t.