 Joe Silvestri, owner of Goffle Road Poultry Farm in Wyckoff, with Pennsylvania-raised turkeys destined for Thanksgiving dinner tables. |
Thousands of families across North Jersey will eat Thanksgiving dinner with a real local flavor -- with fresh-killed turkeys from Wyckoff, rutabagas from an organic farm in Emerson and Jersey-grown cranberries and squash. "Thanksgiving is the perfect time for sharing locally grown foods with friends and family," says Carol Rice, a Ridgewood resident who has been trying to "eat local" to support area farmers for about five years. "Isn't that what the holiday has always been about?"
Thanksgiving dinner done local is a small helping of a national trend toward thinking regionally at mealtime. Proponents, sometimes called "locavores," say eating local is about their health and the environment. Buying locally produced food supports area farmers, keeping them in business so their farms don't become the next housing development.
Eating local also helps fight global warming because the food doesn't have to be shipped a great distance. But most of all, people who eat local know exactly where the food on their plate comes from.
"With all these scares about all the tainted food from around the world -- to know where my food was grown and I don't have to worry about it, it's priceless," says Grace Galvin of Park Ridge. In North Jersey, some dedicated consumers are talking about trying to eat only food grown within, say, 100 miles. Food co-ops are going strong. Community-supported agriculture programs -- where consumers invest in a farm's crop and share the harvest -- have taken root even as the region runs out of room. Trend-setting Whole Foods is pitching "locally grown" like never before.
It's almost as though New Jersey is the Garden State after all. Jim Marek, who owns Old Hook Farm in Emerson, says that to understand the attraction of locally grown food, one need look no further than his rutabagas. "Normally, when you get one for Thanksgiving -- usually in a supermarket -- it's called a waxed turnip because wax is poured around it to keep the moisture in," Marek says. "We sell them fresh, with the leaves on them, and they'll still be in good shape next April -- without being waxed." But it's not always easy to eat locally. The winter months can be lean. And, the days of all the potato and celery farms in Paramus are long gone.
"We would always go to Russell farm in Wyckoff, but it became a housing development," says Barbara Zakur of Hawthorne. "We've been going down to the farmers' market in Paterson for as long as I can remember. We try to eat as locally as possible." Galvin likes to eat local to keep the remaining farms going. "We have so few farmland resources anymore. Tice's, Van Riper -- all the farms that used to be here are gone," she says.
Thanks to people like her, Abma's Farm in Wyckoff has seen solid growth as well -- although Jim Abma wonders ruefully if that isn't partly because other local farms have been bought out by developers. Goffle Road Poultry Farm in Wyckoff, which supplies thousands of fresh-killed turkeys for Thanksgiving, says business has been growing by roughly 10 percent a year. With every report of contaminated spinach from California, demand for locally food increases, proponents say.
Terry Visser, a produce manager for the Acme Market in Clifton, says more customers want to know where their food is coming from: "We have people who hear on the news about problems with food elsewhere, in Chile or China, and right away they worry." Others point to global warming for eating la vida local. "Transporting all this food consumes energy," says Alex Rainer, a Mahwah resident. "When you buy something at the supermarket, you don't know how many trucks transported the thing and how many exhaust fumes were spewed into the atmosphere."
Suddenly, consumers are talking about terms like "food miles" and "carbon footprints." They're asking: Do Americans really need New Zealand apples when they can buy ones grown much closer to home? The first time Rice heard someone say it was more important to eat local than to eat organic, she thought they were crazy. "But now I am working very hard to eat locally because I want to preserve open space," she says. "I want a working relationship with the farmers. I want the food fresh and I want to know what's in it."
In "The Omnivore's Dilemma," a book that has propelled the local food movement, author Michael Pollan sums up the problem: "How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?" Such concerns were one of the reasons Whole Foods markets have been promoting local businesses and farms. "This year 'local' is the buzzword out there, but we tried to make it more defined," says Jeff Turnas, vice president of purchasing for the Northeast region. "We try to identify specific farms and farmers as opposed to just saying it's local."
Whole Foods has developed a two-tiered system for regional produce. Food from New Jersey, New York and Connecticut is considered local. Food from the outlying region is called "Northeast grown." "You may not consider something from Massachusetts local," Turnas says, "but it's a lot closer than California." After reading "The 100-Mile Diet," some people try to eat food produced within that radius. But the book's Vancouver-based co-authors, James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith, came up with the number because their region is bounded by mountains and ocean, and 100 miles was a natural cutoff point. The diet has no real mileage restrictions, and no steadfast rules.
"People ask me whether they can still drink coffee," MacKinnon says. "If the one thing that's preventing you from eating locally is your morning cup of coffee, then have your morning cup of coffee. Local eating is not like vegetarianism. You don't have to do it or not do it. You can do it to any point on the spectrum." In Haworth, Leigh Merinoff tries to grow as much of her food as she can on her own property. "It's a new way of thinking," she says. "The lights have just gone on in New Jersey, and we're doing the best we can." Ben Friedman, founder and CEO of Riviera Produce in Englewood, agrees. "We are coming full circle to the way things used to be," he says. "Food used to come in a pushcart and a horse. You had your local dairy guy, your local produce guy. It's sort of coming back to the fact that people want to know their 'guys' again -- they want to know where their food comes from."