Brian Ries was determined to find out — and struck out on a quest for ingredients made, raised and caught near his own backyard.
I'm only a half hour into pulling strawberries from tidy rows of low plants at Hunsader Farms in Bradenton and I already fear sunstroke. I can't help but wonder: If I faint, will the weather-beaten guy at the counter notice and call for help? Sure, pick-your-own strawberries at less than a dollar a pound are a bargain, but what about the $5 in bottled water I've downed to keep from passing out?
I don't normally sweat for my food, but I'm out to prove a point. I'm determined to create a complete meal exclusively from ingredients raised or grown or caught just a few miles away from where I live.
Sound easy? You'd think so. After all, Florida ranks ninth in U.S. farm production. Our farmers export more than $1.3 billion worth of food every year. Heck, we're the only people in the country growing tangelos.
So why is it that in Florida's supermarkets — and even at some roadside stands — it can be next to impossible to find local food? Though chefs and gourmands tout local ingredients as the foundation of regional cuisine, why do so few restaurants actually use them? Hell, is local food even any better?
Those questions drive me as I pluck the wee, late-season berries. That, and the surreptitious "samples" I sneak, each berry so ripe it disintegrates in my mouth with a burst of heady, floral sweetness. I can already picture the dessert I'll make, maybe just simple sweet cream and some crumbly southern shortcake…
A fellow picker interrupts my reverie to tell me he'll be out here for four or five hours. "I freeze bags of the stuff and eat them the rest of the year," he says, moving along in a crab-like crouch that suggests intensive yoga training.
Five hours? This is not going to be easy.
To Market, To Market: Sweet Tomatoes
Most chefs pay lip service to the joys of local ingredients — it's almost a PR requirement, I realize, after calling around — but the reality is that few restaurants have relationships with local producers. The better products are produced by small growers who may not be able to provide the quantity a restaurant needs. Those who can deliver quantity are usually producing lesser quality for the mass market.
Even when the products are out there, they can be hard to find. "In New Jersey, people were always knocking on my back door with great stuff," says Chris Ponte, chef/owner of Café Ponte in Clearwater. "Nobody comes knocking on my back door here."
So maybe it's not practical for most busy restaurants to rely on area ingredients. Like Ponte, they'll just highlight their menus with the few local products that meet their standards and availability requirements. They've got access to the best ingredients the world has to offer, so they'll get by.
In fact, all of us can find some of the best agricultural and culinary products of dozens of nations from across the globe, all neatly packed and stacked down at our neighborhood supermarket. Every meal we make at home can be a nutritional adventure, a hodge-podge of culinary cultures giddily mixed for our eating pleasure. With such a surfeit of exotic choices, why should I go to the trouble of searching out local food?
"National security," says Laura Morton, coordinator of the Florida West Coast Resource Conservation and Development Council and an employee of the USDA.
"In the U.S., our food travels an average of 1,300 to 1,500 miles before it gets to us," she says, adding that the danger of reliance on foreign goods doesn't stop with oil. In a national emergency, she sees local agriculture as necessary for community self-reliance. Not to mention what a trip that long does to the quality of the food.
With more than 80 percent of Florida's food shipped in from out of state, she has a point. "Do you want to depend on a vital shipment of food to appear from somewhere else?" she asks.
Should we all start planting "emergency preparedness gardens"? Maybe. Then again, you could always start with a farmers' market.
On the last weekend in May, I head for the St. Petersburg Saturday Morning Market, in its final days before closing for the summer (the market will reopen in October). There I find veteran produce merchant Brady Johnson, and ask him where he finds his local food.
Most of the year, Johnson heads straight to the source. "I go to Plant City, Arcadia, Alachua, North Florida and Georgia," he intones with the bombastic rhythm of a soapbox preacher, one eye wandering across tables full of bright red tomatoes, greens and cucumbers. If you ever encounter Johnson — also known as Mr. I Got 'Em — it's not likely you'll forget him. He dresses in the trademark top hat and tails that are a family tradition. "My granddaddy started it," he says, "and we been doin' it like this for 60 years."
This month, Brady is setting up shop at the corner of 18th Avenue and 16th Street north of Ybor in Tampa, his new, semi-permanent location. Other vendors might be moving to the year-round markets in Ybor City and Sarasota.
Meanwhile, one slice of Johnson's ripe Ruskin tomatoes — sweet flesh and crisp juices accented by a spare sprinkle of kosher salt — is all I need to fortify my local meal ambitions.
Forget national security. For me, this quest is about flavor.
Stephen Gran, Hillsborough County's agricultural development manager, also seeks out roadside stands like Mr. I Got 'Em. For Gran, it's all about the economics.
According to Gran, the average price paid to area farmers in 2006 for a pound of tomatoes was 27 cents. How much do you pay at the store? Chalk up that extra 90 to 95 percent to packers who prepare the produce for shipment, as well as wholesalers and retailers. When you cut out the middle man and buy from a farm, or through a roadside stand or retailer that deals directly with the producer, you usually save money and get a better product. And more money goes to the local farmer.
Sweetwater: Have Some Broccoli
Rick Martinez is a pioneer in making it easier for people to support their local farmer. Twelve years ago, he moved his specialty sprouts business to a small plot of land inside Tampa city limits, much more convenient than his previous digs out in Lutz, and started an organic-farm consulting business that soon took up most of his time.
"I hated to see [my] farm abandoned," said Martinez, so he gathered together people of like mind who shared his vision of what the farm could be. Sweetwater — Florida's first community-supported farm — was born.
It's a concept that was devised by Massachusetts-based Indian Line Farms in 1985. Essentially a single-farm co-op, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) doesn't refer to government subsidies or county tax breaks, but to a more direct relationship with consumers. Think of it as the Netflix of produce.
Pay a yearly membership fee — just under $600 at Sweetwater — and you get produce every week during a growing season that spans October to May. The farm gains a guaranteed outlet for its products and money up front, and it can tailor its crops to suit the needs of members. At Sweetwater, you can even log hours as a farm worker and get a discount off your membership.
On my first visit to Sweetwater, I wasn't sure I was at the right place. It's just a quarter mile from Veteran's Expressway, around the corner from a bodega and a quickie mart, down a neighborhood street lined with typical '60s block housing. There's no sign when you turn into the farm's dirt driveway, just the sudden sense that you've entered an agrarian oasis amid a heavily residential area.
Under the shady pine trees near the tractor shed and greenhouse stands a hand-lettered wooden board with last week's produce picks listed for the members, maybe a dozen different varieties. Members are afforded a bit of choice in their selection, but the joy of this type of "shopping" is that you never know what you'll end up with. It can force you to expand your vegetable horizons.
This late in May, a week before the final member pickup of the season, there isn't much growing at Sweetwater other than some wilted collards and an expanse of sunburned basil, but Martinez manages to find a stray stalk of broccoli to munch on as we tour the tiny farm. On two acres, divided by a road and a creek into three different fields, Sweetwater manages to produce about 60 different fruit and vegetable crops — all organic — every year.
Sweetwater has several things going for it besides the quality of its produce. "We were the first CSA in Florida, we're the largest CSA in Florida by membership count, and we're the only nonprofit CSA in Florida," Martinez says, but quickly realizes that there's something else that appeals to people more. "What really makes us so popular is that we're urban."
Sweetwater's convenient location is a rarity. Rampant growth in residential and commercial development has forced many farmers to make the choice between selling out for millions of dollars or rolling the dice on the profitability of their crops. Not surprisingly, many opt to sell. Agricultural land has decreased by over 36 percent in the past 10 years in Hillsborough, with estimates higher in Manatee and Sarasota counties. There just aren't as many farms.
"There's this big myth that building houses equals economic development, but the truth is that houses use community resources while agriculture subsidizes the community," explains Laura Morton, referring to Stephen Gran's 2005 study in Hillsborough County. His report showed that for every dollar of tax revenue a farm generates, it only requires 25 cents in services. For every dollar that residential development generates, the government pays out $1.29. "Once the building is done, it doesn't add up," Morton explains.
Gran's motto is "Buy local fruit, save a farm." You might even add: Buy local food, prevent tax increases.
Worden Farm: Taste The Hibiscus
Following the flight path of fleeing farms, I head for the hinterlands, way down south in Punta Gorda, and find myself plowing through clouds of love bugs I can measure only in biblical terms. The land out here, just a couple of miles off of I-75, is still largely rural, but that's changing. Many of the smaller farms have For Sale signs planted out front. Tightly packed arrangements of stuccoed houses have sprung up on a few of the plots.
I'm here to see a different style of CSA, the 55-acre Worden Farm, started by a husband-and-wife team in 2003. "Both Chris and I have PhDs in agriculture," Eva Worden says as we jostle through a cleared field in their weather-beaten golf cart, "and we've always farmed." During her time at Yale — yep, they train politicians and farmers there — she even did her dissertation on CSAs. "So feel free to ask me anything," she offers.
Sweetwater is maxed out at 200 members, but Worden's size means they can support many, many more than the 150 they currently have on the rosters, once the land is whipped into shape.
Worden Farm is exactly what I expected out of rural agriculture, compared to the tight quarters of Sweetwater. Almost a dozen tractors — some more than 50 years old and still in daily use — are settled in the shade of a wooden shelter. The casual scattering of outbuildings shows a disregard for space management this townie finds hard to comprehend. There's room to spread out here. It's a farm.
Still, it surprises me how much food there seems to be just, well, lying around. Soon, my arms are full of stuff that didn't have to travel more than a few feet from origin to my hands, let alone 1,300 miles.
It's not just the kale and sunflowers cut straight from the field ("it's a little late for the kale, but I couldn't stand the idea of not having something fresh to eat," admits Eva). There are also pastel-colored eggs pulled from the henhouse that serves the family and farm staff, freshly laid and still warm; fragrant rosemary and lemongrass plucked from clumps growing haphazardly near the office; a shank of wild boar shot on the property by farmhand George; and a clump of vivid purple cranberry hibiscus leaves. I stuff one in my mouth and am shocked by the bright tart flavor that explodes on my tongue. I've never seen them before, but I'm sure going to make use of them.
Because it is so far off the beaten path, Worden Farm uses drop-off points in Sarasota and Venice to get produce to many of its members. Kid-friendly events held every Saturday during growing season encourage people to stop by.
"Most people don't feel any connection to the land or where their food comes from," says Eva. "We'd like to change that a little."
Parke's Hydroponics: Lettuce All Year
After touring the churned dirt and nigh-empty fields at Sweetwater and Worden Farms, I'm beginning to realize that Rick Martinez was right. Eating local is a seasonal thing. From June through September, almost nothing grows in our neck of the woods. It's simply too hot. But there is one way to coax things to grow in the blazing Florida summer.
Pulling off I-4 in Dover, just west of Plant City, many of the fields are still covered in green, but it's a sickly, ragged shade, tinged with brown and yellow, the bright sun and 90-degree temps scarring strawberry plants all across town. Farms are slowing down for the summer months and migrant workers have largely left to follow the season along the more temperate Eastern seaboard. Many will work their way up to New England, then follow the apple harvest back down south.
The Parke family is in its third generation growing strawberries on hundreds of acres throughout Dover, and they are traditional farmers. Except for Gary. He's the youngest, and he doesn't follow tradition.
"People aren't going to like me saying this, but the family industry won't be around in 30 years," he says, leaning back in a cheap plastic chair shaded from the harsh mid-afternoon sun, in front of a blown-up family photo of Gary with his wife and four kids. With gray shorts, tennis shoes and red polo shirt, he looks more like a golfer than a farmer, but that's because his farm calls for a different style of work. Three years ago, he branched out on his own, with just a half-acre of land, $130,000 and a belief in hydroponics.
"People 'round here came by and told me, politely now, you're an idiot! Then I explain what I'm doing, and they start thinking." He smiles and gestures to his "field," an expanse of ground entirely covered in tight black mesh, so clean you might think it gets vacuumed daily. In neat rows, under a lattice of white PVC pipes that span the entire area, are tiered towers of gray Styrofoam covered in greenery. They look more like postmodern houseplants than agriculture, but that's hydroponics for you.
Each tower is home to a dozen small pockets, where plants are rooted in an inert soil of crushed volcanic rock and fed a slow and steady supply of water and nutrients via the pipes. "Exactly what they need, no more, or less," says Gary, as he reaches out and pops a cherry tomato streaked with red and green into his mouth. The plants are pesticide-free, and Gary hopes to have his organic certification soon. "It's in the government's hands now," he muses.
He points out some of the dozens of crops he grows through the year — huge heads of perfectly clean Bibb lettuce hanging ponderously from high perches; young celery dangling flaccid and limp; and pink and yellow nasturtium blossoms. He plucks a yellow one for me and I pop it in my mouth, where it bursts with the sharp bite of radishy spice. I stop to pack up a half-dozen to go, along with the lettuce, and some cherry tomatoes that have hit the perfect balance of sweet and tart.
Gary claims that he can fit six times as many plants, that each plant will produce five times as much fruit, and that he'll spend 90 percent less on the maintenance of his plants than his neighbors will. "You do the math, " he says, looking across the street. "They'll all be coming to me eventually."
Even better, his growing season is year-round for most of the crops. That means that when the traditional farms close for the summer, Gary is still growing beans and peas, celery and greens, and a dozen other vegetables, selling them out of the roadside stand at the edge of his property. At $1.50 per pound for almost everything he grows, it's competitive with supermarket stuff.
Go Fish: Grouper from Nachman's, sturgeon from Mote
I've put a lot of miles on the car and packed the fridge with produce, but now it's time for something a little more substantial. I know where I can find a Florida main course very close to home.
For most of us, area agriculture is represented by a green mass of fields and farms east of I-75 that crouches just outside our peripheral consciousness. But the sparkling blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico are front and center in our environmental psyche. It's why many people move here; it's why many of us stay. It's also full of tasty fish.
More than 12 million pounds of Gulf fish and shellfish land in Pinellas every year. No one knows that more than Tim Nachman. He's a former commercial captain who helped his friends butcher their catch and wholesale it directly to restaurants and retailers. "I was a great fish cutter," he reminisces, "so I gave up fishing and started doing it full time."
Now, he has a stable of about 20 independent fishermen, "mostly smaller boats that stay out just a day or two," and he deals almost exclusively in the local fish they provide him. When boats pull in at his Nachman's Native Seafood facility on the Redington Shores docks, the fish often hit the ice-filled storage bins just 24 to 48 hours after they were pulled from the water.
"Kept whole, it stays fresh a lot longer," Nachman explains; his small crew doesn't butcher the fish until orders roll in. This time of year, his bins are full of red and black grouper, and the final few snapper boats will unload their catch this week, before the season closes. His refrigerated trucks will deliver the fish, cut to order, to dozens of Bay area restaurants.
The grouper are giant, skin glistening and eyes bright. I walk out with 2-inch-thick filets of pearly flesh and thoughts of charcoal or steam.
Not all of the area's fish comes from the Gulf. Mote Marine Labs in Sarasota — besides searching for the Titanic, studying sharks and looking for ways to stop red tide — also sells some great sturgeon, raised at its aquaculture research facility in eastern Sarasota County.
Mote opened the facility in 2002 to find more cost-effective and sustainable methods of fish and shrimp farming, especially for inland farms where re-circulation is a must. The scientists are a practical bunch, so they knew that people would pay more attention if the research could be made to pay off. Now the program sells 500 to 1,000 pounds of sturgeon a year, mostly to local restaurants, according to program director Dr. Kevan Main. "It's a beautiful fish," says Jeremy Saccardi, sous chef at Sarasota's Verona at the Ritz.
He's right, but I'm more interested in the tiny black eggs that make the sturgeon one of the most desired — and endangered — fish on the planet. "We're very close, but we're not ready to release the product yet," says Dr. Main. "Hopefully, before the end of 2006."
Mote Marine caviar? Definitely. Dr. Main has plans to brand it as a Mote product, and use it as an opportunity to educate people about Mote's sustainable production methods and "to get people to move away from wild sturgeon."
Guess I'll just have to wait until next year to add a caviar course to my local meal.
The Menu: The Fruits of My Labor
Sitting at home, I've surrounded myself with exquisite produce grown by some of our area's farmers, wild game shot by private hunters and pristine fish caught just a few miles from our beautiful beaches. It's a delicious sight, made sweeter by the memory of my labors. Driving counts as labor, right?
If I were to take all this loot and turn it into a single dinner, there's no question it would make a damn fine meal. I craft a menu, one littered with the names and neighborhoods of origin:
A salad of Gary Parke hydroponic Bibb lettuce & spicy nasturtium blossoms, Brady Johnson's Ruskin tomatoes, Worden cranberry hibiscus, fire-roasted Sweetwater green peppers, & Albritton orange juice vinaigrette
•
Sweetwater kale crunch, steamed Nachman's Native Seafood Gulf grouper with Worden lemongrass & my neighbor's bird peppers
•
Creamy Worden boniato puree, Worden wild boar braised in Keel & Curley's "Florida State Fair Best In Show" 2005 Florida Wild Berry Pinot Noir with Sweetwater rosemary
•
Hunsader late-harvest strawberries over Tampa's Blue Bell vanilla ice cream
Tasty, no doubt, but … no. At this point, it seems a little silly to use up all of this bounty at once. If my adventures through the Florida countryside taught me anything, it's that eating local requires a bit of compromise, a fair amount of commitment and a lot of work. It's not easy to go all out. Eating local is a lifestyle choice.
Instead of gorging on all this great local food in one gastronomic orgy, I'm going to spread it out. Lettuce and fish today. Maybe boar and kale tomorrow. Eggs for breakfast, with some fried cherry tomatoes. And I've got to use that baby fennel tonight, before it goes limp.
Then, when it's all gone, I'm going to go out and find some more.
The Food Issue
- Eat my Florida
- Home cooking
- Farm Facts
- Down on the County Farm
- Here, There, Everywhere
- How Does The Wine Taste?
- Off the menu
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2006.
