On local and seasonal food
Any serious chef who values the environment will agree that one of our most important goals should be to cook locally and seasonally. Through our food, we hope to create positive change, reduce our environmental impact, and strengthen our communities.
Unfortunately, due to various constraints, these things often aren’t as easy to accomplish as we would like. One of the things that has always bothered me with the many restaurants that purport to use only “local ingredients” is that they almost always, without fail, still rely heavily on food imported from elsewhere, especially California’s Central Valley (like lemons, oranges, avocados, out-of-season tomatoes, etc.), to cook food that doesn’t actually match our region’s characteristics. I still value any attempt to work with local products, and I’m not entirely opposed to imported and specialty foods, but I don’t like the misinformation, and I think it dilutes our region’s uniqueness. When I moved here from northern California, I was dismayed that a lot of the food I cooked in Portland restaurants was, essentially, Californian cuisine, rather than Oregonian or Pacific Northwest. Don’t get me wrong, I love Californian food - but I want to experience what makes this region special.
Of course, much of this phenomenon is driven simply by economics; there isn’t always a local industry to supply certain products. Often this is due to competition (usually from California’s mega-farms), but I also believe that some of it is driven by a lack of awareness of what our region can even produce, and a consumer demand for out-of-season produce. Most of the population of the Pacific Northwest is from a colonial background or moved here recently (within the last century), and you often see attempts to shoehorn traditions and know-how from those areas onto this region, without fully taking into account what the land itself dictates via its climate and geography.
A really clear example of this is found in horticulture and gardening. Although in recent years, there has been a push to plant and landscape appropriately for our region’s climate, there is still a lot of gardening that is done in the style of the eastern US or Europe. These climates receive much more rainfall in summer, and therefore plants from there are heavily reliant on summer irrigation in ours. This approach is unsustainable and not particularly eco-friendly. It also, in my opinion, dilutes the original character of the landscape.
As a hobby gardener myself, I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from the more recent push to garden with climate-adapted plants and attempted to apply it to cooking. As a chef, I believe that cooking starts at the farm. Good ingredients are, in many ways, more important than what I do to them as a cook. So it all starts with how we grow our food. However, if no one is buying the products that make the most sense for our area, then no one will grow them; farmers simply can’t afford to take the risk.
To me, that means that chefs have an obligation to promote local ingredients and to cook seasonally, to strengthen the local farm economy and protect the environment. Throughout history, many techniques and recipes have been developed to make use of what the land offers; it is our job to educate ourselves, to explore that cultural knowledge, and put it to good use.
My goal is not only to cook with local ingredients, but to also demonstrate new possibilities for the future. We live in a very unique place that offers a lot to work with, and I believe we have a duty to share that wealth with our community.
Facing environmental concerns
Another key reason to promote local and seasonal food is to be more respectful of the environment. Local food travels fewer miles to reach its destination. That singular fact means it puts less strain on the environment.
The other side of that same coin is that in order to truly eat locally, you also have to eat seasonally, otherwise you’ll be shipping food in from warmer regions to be able to eat the same way all year. In winter, we often ship food from as far away as Chile and Argentina because both are located in the Southern Hemisphere and in summer at that time. The food can thus travel some 10,000 miles before reaching our plates. There is no way this is more sustainable than eating food from only 100 miles away. Eating seasonally, however, means giving up the “convenience” of having everything available all the time. I’m personally unbothered by that, because nothing compares to the quality of fresh produce. I’d much wait to eat produce when it’s at its best.
As industry professionals, it’s our job to show people how to eat according to the seasons. We have the skills to make ingredients shine. Our food is a way to celebrate each season and the place we live in.
Biodiversity
A healthier local farm economy has the added benefit of increasing the variety of crops produced on agricultural land, which in turn benefits the environment via increased biodiversity. Increased biodiversity can reduce dependency on inputs (pesticides, fertilizers, etc.) and improve soil health. Without delving too much into the topic, the key thing to know is that nature wants biodiversity. It’s the natural tendency of life on Earth, and we should embrace it, rather than destroy the land around us by overproducing one thing at a time. Monocultures on large farms are known to be incredibly damaging, depleting resources and weakening our long-term food security.
The damage of overharvesting
It’s for similar reasons that I dislike food trends that fetishize an ingredient from one single place in the world. From an ecological standpoint, it’s incredibly damaging. The ecosystem of one small area of the world cannot in any way be expected to support the demand from around the globe. It instead leads to over-extraction of the living resources of an area. One glaring example, with regards to the US, is the recent rise in demand for octopus specifically from Spanish waters, which is treated like the only valid octopus to be eaten anymore, even though our waters contain another, fully edible octopus that is all but ignored - the giant Pacific octopus. It is incredibly unsustainable to ship octopus from across the world instead of eating what’s right here, in our waters, and it puts undue pressure on the Spanish ecosystem. And even though there isn’t a culture of eating our native octopus here, we can simply look to our friends across the pond, in Korea, for detailed information on how to catch, clean, and process the giant Pacific octopus, which is valued in Korea for culinary purposes. And that’s just one example.
How food builds community
I grew up moving frequently during my childhood, not spending more than two or three years in one place. I lived across the US and grew up in both France and Belgium. My personal cultural identity is fairly fractured, since I was born in the US, but came from mostly immigrant families; my grandparents immigrated to Canada from Switzerland, and my other grandfather emigrated from Germany due to WWII and married an American woman from a Southern family. Both sides were corporate families and moved frequently between Europe, North America, and South America. With several generations of nomadic life, I personally struggled to find a sense of belonging in any one place, and I believe as a result, a lot of the drive I have to cook and create comes from an underlying search for that sense of belonging.
And that’s the thing: countless people in the US experience similarly nomadic lives, or come from a multicultural background, or were displaced from their original home. With the colonial and immigrant fabric of our society, a sense of upheaval and cultural loss is simply a given for most people. Despite that, this mobility is also one of our greatest strengths, and has been the source of amazing new music, art, cuisine, etc., as cultures meet and combine in new and fascinating ways, and people strive to express their identities to others.
As for food, I feel that it’s one of the most powerful unifiers. One of the easiest ways to connect with another culture is to share and enjoy a meal together. The need to eat is biological and unavoidable - no human can go without, so at its core, it’s one of the most fundamental experiences we all share. In fact, the word culture itself comes from the Latin word cultura, "a cultivating, agriculture”. Food and culture are inextricably intertwined.
Many of us come from different backgrounds, different places, and different upbringings. But we do all share one thing in common when we live together: we’re in the same place, at the same time. Our cuisine can be a very pure expression of this when it’s sourced locally and seasonally. When we look forward to the fresh hop season, or the first watermelons in summer, we share that experience as part of our cultural identity.
Culture and terroir
The popularity of many products in the Pacific Northwest is directly tied to the fact that they grow well here. Kale, hummus (chickpeas), and beer (hops) are great examples of this. Some varieties of plants simply grow better here than elsewhere; these varieties become our regional specialties and we can share a sense of pride in what we are able to produce and consume. A great example is the Pacific Northwest’s wine industry. Many varieties of grapes can be grown here, but Pinot Noir grapes excel, and have thus become synonymous with the region.
The French have a word for this, “terroir”. It refers to the characteristics of a region - the soil, the climate, and the cultural preferences found there. The terroir is the combination of all the things that make it special and unique, and I believe it’s a core aspect of a cuisine’s character. Its authenticity is derived from the ingredients of its terroir and from its local cooking techniques, and is subject to change, whether due to climate change or new cultural influences. We live in a time of globalization, and cultural influences come from all around the world now. I think it should be expected that food is affected by a broader range of influences nowadays.
The flipside of this concept is that our terroir and land will, by definition, never produce food that can exactly copy another region. In my mind, when trying to showcase another region’s cuisine in our area, “authenticity” is not a truly realistic goal unless you are only using imported products. So if you’re shooting for local and seasonal food, it’s a better goal to cook food in the style of another region, rather than an exact copy. I think it’s completely doable to interpret the philosophy and feel of a cuisine in a localized manner. Rather than cooking Italian food, we can cook Italian-style Oregonian food - Italian food seen through the lens of the land surrounding us. This approach is in many ways what led to the regional variations seen in Italian food to begin with - for example, gelato in northern Italy is made with much more dairy in it than in Sicily, due to the fact that dairy production is much higher in northern Italy, where the land is more conducive to that. Although entirely derived from Italian traditions, the extensive use of chestnuts in Corsica is entirely due to the fact that chestnuts grow spectacularly well on the island. Rather than corn polenta, Corsicans eat chestnut pulenta. There are countless examples of regional variations dictated by the land itself, and I don’t see why this can’t or shouldn’t be applied here as well.
The problem with authenticity, ethnic food, and fusion cuisine
Many restaurants in the US are themed around the cuisine from another country. For example, if you look at a food delivery or online review service, the categories are based mostly around this idea. You can pick from Chinese, Korean, Italian, French, etc. The category of “American” food is basically just Anglo- and German-derived cuisine, or some kind of Western European fusion. Culturally, we’ve decided that these are the most “American”, which I find problematic in and of itself.
Personally, I have a hard time with most French restaurants I’ve eaten at in the US. For me, it almost always feels like a parody of the culture I grew up in. I’d much rather French culture wasn’t presented as a “theme”. I’d prefer food made from local ingredients, using French techniques and a French approach to flavor.
Within this mindset of “themed” restaurants, people often refer to how “authentic” food is, and try to quantify how “authentic” a restaurant is. I find this to be a waste of effort. Why should we strive for the flawed concept of “authenticity”? Just because your grandmother made a dish one way, does that make it more “authentic” than the way someone else’s grandmother made it? Is authenticity even possible unless it’s cooked in the exact same place it was invented in?
I suggest that we instead take inspiration from our personal lives and the cultures around us and celebrate them by creating versions of dishes that are authentic to our home here in the Pacific Northwest. I think it makes a statement that these influences have just as much a place in our community as any other, that they don’t have to be “themed” versions of another culture, or treated as “ethnic” cuisine, an entirely awful term that only serves to separate supposedly “un-American” cuisines.
You might say that this is just the idea behind “fusion cuisine”, and I agree, that at its core, fusion cuisine does represent the desire of many chefs to combine and create a new language in food that better represents our new, shared culture, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I do think, unfortunately, that it often ended up creating an additional source of othering and a sense that it was more of a gimmick than something that belonged at the core of an area’s culture, in large part due to the “theming” of restaurants. I think that by adding in a stronger connection to the land, by emphasizing time and place (with seasonal and local ingredients), we create a greater sense of cultural identity and connection, while still honoring the cultures and traditions that influence and make up our community.
For the people
Affecting broad change really relies on building something for the masses, not the wealthy. Often positive goals are pushed in fine dining settings, which sets a great example and absolutely pushes the envelope of where food can go. Many great chefs have spent their time searching for solutions to the issues our food supply system faces. That said, I feel that focusing so heavily on fine dining and food for the upper classes alienates most people and creates a barrier to widespread change. If we want to create demand for better food and demand for more local agricultural products, we need to focus on everyday, practical, and affordable food.
Many of the greatest dishes in the world were created as peasant food. An excellent example is cassoulet from the south of France. A dish made of preserved duck and beans, two common ingredients for the region that were affordable. I find it a bit ridiculous that many French peasant dishes are treated like food for the wealthy, or made pretentious, especially in the US, rather than something that belonged to everyone. Risotto, paella, boeuf bourguignon, cheese and cured meats - the examples are countless - these are all foods that come from peasant traditions.
The beauty of these dishes is that they were designed out of necessity, and made use of low-cost ingredients and accessible methods. I think that we can create new dishes that are designed with the same mentality and benefit our community by improving access to local food, and raising the baseline level of our regional cuisine. Having a thriving regional food scene means that you don’t have to seek out great food, it’s everywhere around you.
