Sustainable Tastes

A few nights ago we hit up TASTE Restaurant at the Seattle Art Museum. Now, normally I am not a fan of restaurants attached to things...museums, hotels, stadia, etc. But I'd read an article on TASTE and knew that they focused on locally raised meats, locally grown produce, and sustainably caught fish. They cultivate relationships with farmers and regularly change their menu to reflect the season. All of this led me to give the restaurant a try, despite its slightly intimidating feel. Now we are regulars. The menu is a bit pricey (although certainly comparable to many other downtown restaurants who do not focus on local products) but we have attended the urban suppers ($12!) and had the three course, $30 menu.
But overall we are regulars at happy hour. It's tough, coming from the Eastside, to make it before 6pm, so we take any chance. They have a superb head bartender in Duncan, who insists people taste the wines and liquors and beers. A better tap list would make TASTE hour of happy even better, since 18 oz of beer can be had for $3, but now that they have Flor de Cana, I shan't complain. Bar food is $6 and so we can make a decent meal at a reasonable price. And we always, always get at least one order of rosemary frites.
The rosemary frites are delicious--crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, and nice and salty and fragrant. But (coming back to the beginning of the post)on Thursday there was something just a bit...off. They weren't bad, but they weren't mouthwatering. So we mentioned this to Duncan, and he brought us a new order. Although we wanted it to be just a bad batch, it wasn't--the second order still fell flat.
So Duncan sent out Craig Hetherington, Executive Chef. At first we felt bad because, c'mon, they're just fries. But then we realized we are experts on their frites. But what I was most impressed by was not the customer service--even though it goes above and beyond each time, and this was even further beyond--but the fact that Craig was able to explain to me exactly what he believed to be wrong with the potatoes, and the fact that TASTE is a restaurant that enables him to know this.
The potatoes, you see, had not come from Washington. TASTE gets many of their specialty potatoes from Olson Farms, but the russets typically come from a produce distributor. Still they try and source them from within the state, but the distributor had run short of Washington potatoes. These ones just didn't taste the same.
Silly traveling potatoes. Eat local. Support nearby business, particularly ones that know the names of the small farms from which they obtain their produce. Encourage the connections between the rural and urban economies. Be willing to pay a bit more to know exactly where your food originated. The less it travels, the better it tastes.
(Exceptions made for Belgian beer, sriracha, and coffee)

Slow Down--Where Are You Taking Yourself Now?

I found a heroine.

Every movement needs its hero, and the local food movement has Alice Waters. She founded Chez Panisse in the 1970s and she is also the founder of the Edible Schoolyards program. She is all about local, fresh, being involved with the food. She also recognizes the necessity of atmosphere, about the way a place looks, about hominess, about having a place for people to come together.

She started CP when she was 27. 27! That's a year older than I. So what for me?

The more I read about food, about agriculture, about the environment, the more that I know that this is where my heart is. I know that I want to be part of the movement toward local food, to encourage people to buy from local producers, to realize what it is like to taste something picked a few hours ago or to have an egg that was just hatched this morning. The decrease in biodiversity worries me. The idea of agribusiness in our country shoving out small producers in other nations infuriates me.

So I have that much. I know what I love and and what makes me angry and what makes me passionate. And where do I go from there? Maybe I don't know yet. I know that I want to start a community garden. This city is has such little access to food. It also has so many empty lots. I'm sure it's tough to grow crops in this climate, but there must be something we can do. I know also I want to be involved in writing about this. I feel like I've been so focused on this vague dream of writing a novel when really, my skills lie in expositional writing. I love the research, I love the communication, I love organizing so that someone reads it and gets it.

Where will this all lead me? Again, I don't have to know yet. But I'm tired of it just being an idea in the back of my mind. Since I was little, I wanted to save the world and I wanted to write. I remember writing about the environment, in fact. When, if not now?

There are so many pieces to this. I'm going to have to really think hard about eating local...I pay attention, but sometimes I can't resist the Washington apples or California strawberries (although I'm still laughing about the sign in whole foods that told me that the watsonville strawberries might be damaged by the san diego fires). I need to learn how to keep one plant alive and see if I can do some container gardening. I want to get better at my cooking and learn to pay attention to each individual ingredient. And, of course, I feel this need to tell the world about it...probably starting here in this blog.
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