His message was much the same this year when he spoke at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Sustainable Foods Institute a few weeks ago. Speaking on a panel called “The Future of Food: Scaling Down,” Chef Keller made the distinction between geographically local and temporally local food.
That is, he personally considers local food to be anything that he can get at his doorstep within one day of harvest – even if that means flying that product overnight from across the country.
Here are some excerpts from Keller’s comments on the panel:
When I started cooking, 32 years ago sustainability wasn’t something that was talked about. And, being a chef, the kind of chef that I wanted to be, was about quality number one: quality of product, quality of execution, quality of experience for the guest.
It all rested on the highest quality that I could produce. For me as I went through my career, I came to understand where our product came from and where the best products came from, the term local changed for me. So it wasn’t about a geographical location, it was about quality of the product.
If we could get great lobsters from Maine everyday at my back door, then for me that was a local product. If I could get the best lamb available from Pennsylvania, then that to me was a local product.
Now certainly, in saying that, all of you are probably thinking “Well, this guy’s crazy “– because he’s talking about sustainability, local geographical products, not leaving a carbon footprint by shipping things across the US, and there are certainly many things to be said for that. But there’s also something to be said for supporting some of our purveyors who have products that are coming across the continent for us, people like Keith Martin, who is my lamber in Pennsylvania.
His protocols, his holistic way of raising his animals is something that I want to continue to support, because I really believe in the way that he’s doing [it]. And eventually he will have an impact on the entire industry, and raise the standard of the entire industry. So, I’m willing to leave a small carbon footprint by shipping his lamb from Pennsylvania to Yountville or to New York or to Las Vegas because we use his lamb in all of our restaurants to continue to support what he’s doing. So, I buy from people I have great respect for.
So, ultimately, Keller is justifying the greater environmental load that his purchasing produces by the possible long-term benefits that supporting quality farmers might create. Keller has also said, “Price isn’t important to me, I just want the very best available.” As such, he admits to having an elitist philosophy – which is partly why he has been so successful in the culinary world.
And I am the first to admit — in the sphere he inhabits, his views work. Extremely well. At the same time, I would strongly caution against implementing this “24-hour local” food rule for the rest of society.
There are several reasons for this:
1) Building a Diverse Community: If everyone bought their food like Thomas Keller, we might have good quality farms but at the same time we wouldn’t have the infrastructure to support them. Our agricultural infrastructure is currently targeted toward the large players in the market. It is difficult, for example, for small meat producers to find a certified processing facility in their local area, or for small farmers to find distribution networks for their products. The more we buy from our local foodshed, the more incentive there will be for these localized networks of infrastructure to be (re)created. In the process, we will make it easier for sustainable food producers to go about the business of growing good, healthy food.
2) Diversity on our Local Farms: If we choose to buy our specialty foods from across the country, we are simultaneously decreasing the food-dollars that go to our local farmers — dollars they might invest in growing those very same products closer to home. Farmers need an economic incentive to grow a variety of plants and animals. This agricultural variety will directly increase the ecological / environmental health of our farm ecosystems, and at the same time encourage better health as we increase the number of foods in our diets.
3) Energy Use: Economist Jeff Rubin has a new book called Why Your World Is About to Get A Whole Lot Smaller which addresses these issues directly. Rubin’s premise is that the current decline in oil prices is going to be short lived, and was caused in large part by our current recession. Once the economic recession is over, oil will again be well over $100 / barrel – which will have a dramatic impact on how we grow and ship food.
Dining and Cooking