By TIM THORNBERRY
Kentucky Correspondent LEXINGTON, Ky. — The local food movement has grown largely because of the public’s desire to obtain fresher, healthier food, but it is a choice to be made by consumers. Few know better about making that choice than Bob Perry, project manager with the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Working Group at the University of Kentucky (UK) College of Agriculture.
Perry knows food, too. Being a chef for 30 years and now teaching the lab portion for the Quantity Food Production class at UK, he also served as director of Food Service and the commonwealth executive chef for the Kentucky Department of Parks, where he led the initiative to bring local foods to the state park system.
Perry said while he is willing to make sacrifices in some areas of buying in order to purchase more local food, it is his personal choice; it’s one that other people will have to make based on their preferences.
“A lot of people are just looking for the lowest price, and that’s a real shame. There are some real quality foods out there,” he said. “That’s one of my goals, to try and educate people’s palates. It’s a personal choice how you spend your money. You can eat less and eat better, or you can eat worse and eat more.”
Perry’s students run an on-campus restaurant called The Lemon Tree in which they prepare a three-course lunch two days a week completely from scratch, using as much local food as possible. He explained many consumers are use to eating “high on the hog,” quoting a fellow chef, but that many restaurants are making a lot of money selling beans and ham hocks and calling it “fine dining.”
“That’s one of my favorite meals,” he added.
He recalled a recent meal he prepared for his family consisting of pinto beans cooked with a ham hock, local kale greens, farm-raised catfish and cornbread made with a local mill’s cornmeal.
“I might have had $5 in the whole meal and fed four people. The ham was local and the kale was local,” he said.
Perry’ meal is indicative of the fact that consumers can eat well using local products, without breaking the bank. “You don’t have to have steak at every meal,” he said.
There are ways to get the public acclimated to eating better with more local goods. Perry suggested in the case of meat, to start by purchasing a freezer.
“That is something making a big comeback. There is a group of farmers in northern Kentucky that got together and created a freezer-beef program. They had an informational meeting and over 300 people showed up,” he said.
He recently purchased a quarter-steer from an area custom meat shop, noting it was some of the best beef he had ever found and was much less expensive to buy it in quantity rather than piece by piece.
He said many producers are out there who will sell in quantities when it comes to beef, and it is much more economical.
For those interested in pasture poultry; however, it is more expensive than buying regular whole birds at the grocery – but Perry has a recommendation for that, as well.
“For my two sons, my wife and myself, I can roast a chicken with a bunch of vegetables for one meal then I can pull the meat, make a stock with the bones and make a great soup and have another full meal for four people,” he said.
“While that chicken may have cost me a pretty penny, when feeding four people twice, the per-meal cost sort of goes away when you do the math.”
Perry added it’s difficult to get people thinking like that again and it is one of his goals to do so; to taste food for the first time, noting how much better pasture chicken tastes than commodity chicken.
A good place to look for these different products are the farmers’ markets, said Perry. The county extension agent is another avenue since they are familiar with their local producers. He also suggested a website called MarketMaker, a database of all farms selling food directly in this region.
A key to buying local food is to look at the economy, said Perry. “I don’t think you can talk about local food without talking about the local economy,” he pointed out.
“Those two are really one in the same, and especially in the rural areas. In what I call fractional job creation, the more we develop a local food system and the more farmers we can put back to work either part-time or full-time, they would then leave off-farm jobs and open them up to someone else.”
Perry added it would be a win-win situation, as farmers could get back to the land taking better care of it and producing good, healthy food.
Though touting local food, he points out just because it comes from local sources doesn’t mean it’s better, and it takes a concentrated effort to find what is best for each individual. “You have the freedom to choose with your dollars what you think is good and what you think is not,” he said. “Some farmers are better than others.”
Perry summed up the situation with a saying from famed Kentucky author Wendell Berry: “How you spend your money to a large part determines what the world is going to be like.”
“If you start spending money with a farmer that produces really good food and you start spending more and more of your money with them, you are changing the world,” Perry added.
For more information about MarketMaker, go to http://national.marketmaker.uiuc.edu |
