The Local Food Con

The provenance of food is important to man of us. Knowing the lamb is raised in an environment where it is cared for, where it is fed grass, where it is treated well is a reason that I buy my lamb from Pure Bred Lamb.  I also know that Thomas Keller buys his lamb from these same fields, so I go to his restaurant.

In Phoenix I discovered that the classic “wedge” from Tarbell’s restaurant, well- listen to the podcast.

But what happens when a restaurant makes a claim that they buy their food from, but in fact they don’t. This happens a lot.

Most often restaurants try to cash in on the “local” food claim, that they get their food locally when they often don’t.

In this podcast I interview Laura Riley, a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, who uncovered this in the Tampa Bay area. Below is the transcript.

Terry Simpson: We live in an era where few people cook, and even fewer people raise their own food. It’s easy to make fun of foodies, especially those that tick off Michelin-star restaurants they’ve dined with the same seriousness as Boy Scouts collecting badges. But most foodies know a lot more about food than their parents, who cooked. And foodies are conscientious about the provenance of their food.

TS: We know that local food travels about 44 miles, whereas most food travels about 1500 miles to get to our plate. Seems like common sense to want to eat local. It supports a local industry, it decreases the carbon footprint of the food that we eat. We tend to know more about local soil where the food was grown, the methods of how the food was grown, whether it’s organic or not. And often, local food just tastes better.

TS: Recently, in one of my favorite restaurants in Phoenix, I made a snarky comment to the waiter, when the menu noted that the lettuce for the wedge salad was locally grown. I mean, this is Arizona. This is where most of the world’s lettuce is grown. Kind of nothing special, right? I snarked that the lettuce was just a vehicle for the wedge, that the star is, of course, blue cheese and bacon. The waiter just smiled. The plate came, and the lettuce was this baby gem romaine, so kind of interesting. True to form, I scooped up the bacon and the blue cheese dressing with some lettuce leaves, and I ate it. The lettuce blew me away.

TS: The lettuce wasn’t just a vehicle. It was the star of the plate. So, I called the waiter back over. “That’s the best lettuce I ever tasted,” I said. “Tell me about it.” Turns out the lettuce was from Carl Seacat, whose gardens are a couple of hours from Phoenix. You can find Carl on Twitter, @seacatgardens. He is a passionate farmer, and tweets photos of his lettuce and tomatoes like I tweet photos of my eight-year-old.

TS: The next week, I went back to Tarbell’s with my mouth ready for that delicious lettuce. Lettuce. I never thought I would put delicious and lettuce side by side in any sentence. But I was disappointed the item was off the menu, so I asked the waiter, “What happened?” He said, “Well, we used all the lettuce, but in a week or two, we’re going to have Seacat tomatoes on the menu.”

TS: You’ll see as we go further into this story that restaurants who change menus frequently, based on availability of local foods, are rare indeed. When I returned to Tarbell’s two weeks later, I had an amazing tomato salad, made from tomatoes that Seacat harvested from his farm in  Pauline, Arizona. Local fresh food, combined with a talented chef, will make an amazing meal. But today, I will tell you what happens when the restaurant says it’s getting its food locally, but doesn’t. These restaurant cons call it farm to table, but we call it farm to fable.

TS: My name is Dr. Terry Simpson, and this is my podcast, Culinary Medicine: Food Cons and Food Conversations, where we have conversations about food as medicine, and discuss food cons, exposing myths, cons, and mountebanks.

TS: The local food con goes like this. A restaurant makes a claim that they get their food from some local sources. They may even go so far as to list the local farms and ranches that they claim they buy their food from. But instead of buying it from local sources, they actually buy it from the same distributor as every other restaurant in the world. There are several of those large multinational restaurant suppliers, people like Sysco, Tyson, US Foods, all of which have great food. And many famous chefs have taken this food and every night, make amazing meals from it.

TS: In Tampa, Florida, one prominent food critic found that many restaurants who offered local products, and advertised themselves as farm to table, were conning their patrons. They were really farm to fable. That writer with the skeptical eye was …

Laura Reiley: My name is Laura Reiley. I am the food critic at the Tampa Bay Times, and before that, I was a food critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, and before that, at The Baltimore Sun.

TS: And she has a degree in culinary arts. As a food critic, she’s used to restaurants stretching the truth a bit.

LR: I think I’ve been lied to since I started being a food critic in 1991. Initially, it was things like, this is not actually a Dover Sole, and that is not actually prime meat, and this lobster bisque was not house-made. It came off the back of the Sysco truck. Those kind of misrepresentations, I think, escalated as soon as the idea of locavorism, or farm to table restaurants, came to the fore.

TS: When Alice Waters opened her research, Chez Panisse, in the early 1970s, she didn’t think she was founding a local food movement. For her, getting produce locally was an attempt to reproduce that great flavor she remembered from her time in France.

TS: The food and the chefs from her restaurants in Berkeley inspired the local food movement. And it took about 30 years for that farm to table lexicon to make it into our vernacular, and patrons began to pay a premium to eat local food. That meant farm to table was ripe for that farm to fable con. That makes it right about the time that our food critic began to find that restaurants were trying to cash in on the latest trend.

LR: I would say around 2007, 2008, a lot of restaurants, and even outdoor markets, realized that there was a certain kind of financial boon to representing farm names and provenance claims on your menu or chalkboard, or whatever. I more and more became convinced that they couldn’t all possibly be true. Part of that is here in Florida, the season is very particular.

LR: I went to a very famous restaurant here called Bern’s several years back, and in the middle of July, my waiter told me, “All of the produce that we serve is grown at our own five-acre organic garden.” I said, “Well, could you point to what on the plate is from the organic garden?” And the waiter said, “Oh, these carrots, those mushrooms,” things that flagrantly don’t grow in Florida in July.

TS: Bern’s Steak House in Tampa? I mean, it’s known for amazing steaks and the largest private wine collection in the world. All I could think about when she said that was, They have produce?

TS: It turns out many years ago, Bern’s did have a local farm where they grew food. The founder, Bern Laxer, was ahead of his time. But that business line had been shuttered years ago. Bern discovered that it was more reliable to get vegetables from a national distribution chain than growing it. I mean, it is impossible to grow most produce in July in Tampa.

TS: But that waiter’s food fib, as clumsy as it was, started that journalist on an investigation.

LR: I kind of went to my editors, and I said, “I think there’s something here,” and as with any investigation at the paper, it can’t just be a hunch. You have to actually come forward with some legitimate evidence, so I went to one of the restaurants that I thought was … It was a very good restaurant, but it was one that I thought likely to be misrepresenting, and I basically took a picture of their chalkboard of farmers, and then started calling the names on the chalkboard. And it turned out, a lot of them were fraudulent.

LR: From there, I made myself a list. I’ve saved every menu that I’ve ever eaten of the restaurants that I’ve ever reviewed. I sat on the floor of my office with a thousand menus-

TS: Wait, a thousand menus? That’s a lot of restaurants to review.

TS: Here’s the difference between true journalism and a foodie reviewing their favorite restaurant. This is journalism, from a true food critic. No wonder she was nominated for both a Pulitzer and a James Beard award for this investigative reporting.

TS: Anyway, I just can’t get past that thousand number. Let’s hear it again.

LR: I sat on the floor of my office with a thousand menus, and just sifted them into piles, like: these restaurants make no provenance claims; these restaurants make provenance claims that seem reasonable; these ones seem a little less likely. And so I kind of came to a pile of restaurants that I thought were worth checking out, and then I started drilling down.

TS: Going through the restaurants who made the claims that were suspicious, she came up with about 50. What’s the upcharge for that farm to table fable?

LR: I mean, it really depends upon the item. If you’re talking about an heirloom breed artisanally-raised pork chop, versus a commodity pork chop, that’s about 3X the price. Produce can be double, maybe. It really depends. It’s item by item.

TS: If you read her series, and we’ll have a link to it on our app and on our website, she names the restaurants. Some of the restaurants confessed quickly that they had made a mistake, that they had not changed the menu. But some did not.

LR: Yeah, all of the restaurants that I called out by name in the series amended their ways at least temporarily. In some cases, they just took off all provenance claims on their menus. In others, they tried to be more accurate, in terms of what they were claiming. But a lot of those perpetrators, the ones that really did have egregious offenses, went back to their ways pretty swiftly, because there are no checks and balances.

TS: She went on to point out that there are some very dedicated restaurants in the nation, restaurants who devote themselves to local fare, and are very careful about their claims. So, where does this leave you?

TS: Well, you’re not entirely helpless in the matter. First of all, you should be very skeptical of any local food claim. There are those restaurants who will have the occasional seasonal produce in one week, and then it’s off the menu the next, like Tarbell’s. It’s the mark of a great restaurant. But you should also consider your phone, and how easy it is to Google the farms and suppliers the restaurant says they use, and to see if they actually even make the product.

LR: It’s pretty easy to Google on your phone at the dinner table: Is there a Farmer Brown? Does he sell heirloom tomatoes? Does he say he sells heirloom tomatoes to this restaurant? Are heirloom tomatoes in season right now? So, a lot of these kinds of claims, you can, with a very small amount of legwork, drill down yourself on whether the claim is likely.

TS: The main reason I like local food is it just tastes better when you harvest something that’s ripe. Did you ever have a pineapple in Hawaii? It tastes better than the pineapple we get in the continental United States, because the ones we get here, if you’re in the continental United States, are picked green.

LR: A lot of the organic produce comes from Mexico, and has traveled an enormous distance, or further south, an enormous distance to get to your plate, and often harvested under-ripe so that it can make that long journey. I think the flavor is really missing. I think that the difference between a tomato that’s grown in your market, was harvested two or three days ago, and now you’re slicing it and eating it, it’s a really different flavor, by and large.

TS: If you want local food, you’re going to have to realize that sometimes, things aren’t in season. That blueberry you get in the middle of winter? It didn’t come from the bush in the chef’s backyard. It certainly didn’t come from those great blueberries out of Washington State. Do you really think watermelon grows in December?

TS: We were raised by our parents telling us fables at night, and now we get those fables at night from restaurants, food fables.

LR: We, as human beings, are a whole bundle of contradictions. On the one hand, a lot of us say, “We want to eat local,” but on the other, we kind of want what we want when we want it, you know? We want asparagus 12 months out of the year. We want a tomato on our hamburger 12 months out of the year, and raspberries, and morel mushrooms, and et cetera.

LR: The truth is that a hundred years ago, everyone was a locavore, and everyone ate seasonally, because there weren’t alternatives to that. So, I think that some of the pressure to do this and to be more transparent, it has to come from consumers, and consumers who are willing to say, “I will eat more seasonally,” which means, “I will celebrate what’s in season now, and I will not lament the months out of the year where I can’t get thing X or Y.”

TS: We do love our food stories, and local is one of those stories. We go to a restaurant, we like the story. It’s a part of the entertainment in the era of being a foodie. Local is one of those more compelling stories.

LR: I mean, we’re paying for the story. I think that that’s a big part of how we are entertained in the 21st century. I mean, 50 years ago, date night was dinner and a show, and now I really do feel like dinner is the show, and part of that is provenance stories. That’s part of what we’re paying for, and that’s part of what we’re charmed by, and there just are very few ways of ascertaining whether those provenance stories are honest.

TS: The great thing about being a journalist who dined at over a thousand restaurants, pretty hard to fool you. You just won’t go for that food fable.

LR: That still happens all the time. Well, I’ll eat something, they say, “Oh, this is our house-made limoncello cake,” and I say, “Oh, yeah, I’ve had this a dozen times, this exact cake.” I can go on the website for Sysco, and pull this cake up.

TS: I was at a local restaurant in Baltimore that touted the local provenance of its food. Then I ordered some lemon for my tea. The waiter said, “The local area doesn’t grow lemons,” so the restaurant would substitute a verjus made from a local vineyard. Now, the verjus was delightful. But, the irony wasn’t lost on the waiter, was that the tea probably came from some multinational conglomerate, with zero ability to source even which country the Camellia sinensis bush was grown. But, I digress.

TS: Does local food have better nutrition? There is zero evidence that it does. A farm may grow the food naturally, organically, with or without pesticides, herbicides, or not. You might have a better chance of finding that out if it’s local. But, if food is contaminated by bacteria, that can be a worse outcome. And I remind you about Chipotle’s, who had several outbreaks of salmonella and E. coli food poisoning from local food. So, local food isn’t always better.

TS: Treat the restaurant story as you would the one you were told as a child, or the one you’d tell your child. It’s a fable. It’s a farm to table fable.

TS: Special thanks to Laura Reiley of the Tampa Bay Times, whose story we’ll have a link to right here on our listening app, or on our website. Thanks for her lending her comments to the show. I really think she should have won a Pulitzer or James Beard for her outstanding journalism. And of course, thanks to you, for listening to this episode of Culinary Medicine with me, Dr. Terry Simpson.

TS: While I am a doctor, I am not your doctor, and you should always seek the advice of a trusted, licensed medical provider with experience in your particular condition or concern before taking any actions. But if I am your doctor, my advice should be burned on the fleshy tables of your heart.

TS: Culinary Medicine is a part of the Your Doctors Order network, and the blog to accompany the podcast can be found at yourdoctorsorders.com. This podcast was produced and distributed by Simpler Media, and my friend, Evo Terra. The music selection was by Evo, since me being a hipster ended decades ago. I love to sing in the shower, but he refuses to record me there.

TS: My executive producer is the talented and beautiful @producergirl from Producer Girl Productions. She did record me in the shower, and refuses to release it to the public. But you can follow me on Twitter, where I am @drterrysimpson.

TS: I’ll be back next week, where we’ll have another conversation about food as medicine, or unveil another food con. Until next time, don’t drink the water. Drink the wine.