Jeni’s in Vogue

When we think of artisanal food in Columbus, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams are always at the top of the list… and Jeni Britton Bauer’s sparkling, bubbling passion for food is amazingly infectious.  So it’s heartwarming to read Jeni’s account of their well-earned writeup in Vogue this month.  Give it a read, and join us in congratulating Jeni and her team!

Fair Food – Fair Wages

This week (November 18th-November 26th) is National Supermarket Week of Action, part of the Campaign for Fair Food. As one of the biggest feasts of the year Thanksgiving is an appropriate time for us to remember the workers who produce our food and thank them for their labor by helping to ensure that they receive fair wages and working conditions.

You may remember that earlier this year we wrote about slavery issues in Florida’s tomato fields but concerns about fair wages for farm workers are not limited to tomato fields. Farmworkers in the US earn approximately $11,000 a year. Their real wages have not risen in over 30 years.

Kroger is one of the grocery chains that is being targeted as part of a campaign to address the sub-poverty wages and human rights abuses faced by farmworkers who harvest their tomatoes. If you shop at Kroger please consider printing off one of the store manager letters and taking it with you when you next shop there. Tell Kroger that you support fair wages and working conditions for farmworkers. The more Kroger (and other companies) hear from consumers that this is a priority the more it creates a demand.

The Fair Food project aims to promote a more socially just food system. Their website includes a multimedia presentation called “Fair Food: Field to Table” which comprises three short videos that give more background and information on the issue and fair food movement. The first video deals with the realities for many farmworkers today, the second shows a model of good practice farm labor conditions and the third focuses on advocates and businesses at the forefront of the movement. I highly recommend watching them.

More information can also be found at the Alliance for Fair Food, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Fair Food Project whose website  has a list of resources and suggestions for farmers, consumers, businesses and teachers. Here are the suggestions for consumers:

• Buy local, buy direct, and get to know your farmer! When you have a personal relationship with a farmer it is easier to talk about workplace conditions on the farm.
• Buy Fair Trade labels when possible.  By purchasing fair trade certified products you show support for workers and farmers all over the world and support the growing movement for domestic fair trade in the U.S. and Canada.
• Join a CSA.  By being a member of a farm, you can get to know the farmer personally, and can meet the workers for yourself.  You can let your farmer know it is important to you for the farm to provide good labor conditions.
• Talk with other people.  Potluck, share food, and share the stories behind the food: Where did it come from? Who grew it? What are working conditions like? Getting others thinking about these issues is crucial.
• Get involved in local organizations.  Fair trade could be a great issue for sustainability groups or community groups.  Go to a meeting and see who else is interested in working with you.
• Get in touch with a local farmworker organization to learn more about the issues in your area. Host an event such as a film screening or art exhibit, and have members of the organization come present beforehand.
• Educate others.  Take a look at our “Be an Educator” section to learn more about how you can give a presentation and teach others about the issues.

Local Foods Roundtable

The Local Foods Roundtable was held at the Ohio Department of Agriculture on Thursday November 12th. We were very pleased to be part of the Roundtable because it mirrored our own idea for a Local Food Summit but at a state level rather than just Central Ohio. We were even more pleased that the event attracted over 100 people. The day’s conference included a number of break out sessions covering topics such as innovative local food distribution, marketing and outreach, small scale processing, building partnerships in food policy and engaging economic development in local food and agriculture. It was inspiring to hear some of the stories around the state including some fantastic initiatives in Knox County, Athens County and the Cleveland-Cuyahoga area.

There were also opportunities during the day for informal networking including the Slow Food Columbus reception at the end of the day, which we volunteered to host in the hopes of fostering more connections and opportunities for dialogue. Participants at the conference were from a wide variety of organizations, OSU extension, universities, businesses and non-profits and represented many geographic areas of the state as well as different parts of the local food economy.

Congratulations to Amalie Lipstreu (senior program manager for sustainable agriculture) for planning and co-ordinating the event and thank you to everyone who participated. We hope that there will be many more opportunities for networking, collaboration and discussion in the future. Now the challenge is how to build and maintain connections between groups that could work together on common aims or assist each other with skills, contacts and experience.

We had hoped to showcase and serve Ohio wine and cheese but after months of wrangling about permits we were frustrated to find out that we would be unable to serve wine. We did not know that Ohio had any partly dry counties left.  It does.  (Guess where the Department of Agriculture is located?). We did serve some delicious local products though including bread from the Eleni Christina bakery (owned by Slow Food member Kent Rigsby), ramp crackers from Integration Acres and flax seed crackers Stan Evans bakery in Grandview, roasted Wayward Seed Farm Chioggia and golden beets and local apple cider. Many thanks to Blue Jacket Dairy for donating some of their fabulous cheeses for the reception: herb chevre, Ludlow, pumpkin quark and a variety of cheese curds.

Wine Clash II: The Sequel

The indefatigable Andrew Hall has struck again, pitting Ohio wines against their Michigan counterparts in a reprise of last year’s groundbreaking Wine Clash. Now, as then, the focus was exclusively on quality, with an array of judges ranging from sophisticated consumers up to Sommeliers, and on local wine, with an unyielding requirement that all wines be produced from grapes grown in-state.

A few things were slightly different this year, however.

For one thing, last year’s broad array of top wines made people wonder which state had won the competition. (Perhaps the proximity of a certain football game had stirred up their rivalrous tendencies?) For another, the number of categories made it difficult to say which wine was the overall winner.

With those points in mind, Mr. Hall set the wines against each other—an evenly-matched set of 11 from each state—and carefully tallied the scores. You can read about the results in an article written by one of the judges. (Next year, Michigan, next year….)

Why do we find this event to be so exciting? (And we do.) Two reasons stand out. The first is that wine is the neglected stepchild of the locavore movement. Even in California, restaurants that compete to see who can source produce and meat from the closest farmers think nothing of having a predominantly European wine list—a discrepancy that locavores have noticed and find more than slightly annoying.

The second reason is that it’s a great example of taste education in action. Wine is an area in which prejudice and social convention trump taste; put simply, people are often afraid to trust their taste buds for fear of looking or sounding like they don’t know what they’re talking about. (This fear is most readily apparent on first dates.) And following social convention with wine generally means gravitating toward France, Italy, California, maybe Argentina or Spain… but not Ohio or Michigan. But wine experts, who do trust their taste buds, are actually a lot more generous than the general public when it comes to the best of Ohio and Michigan wines. If you really want to surprise some of your friends this holiday season, pick any wine off of this list—doesn’t really matter which one—and pour it for them without telling them where it’s from.

Vote On Issue 2

With election day coming up next Tuesday, a food-related ballot issue that may be of great significance to the citizens of central Ohio has been getting a lot of attention: Issue 2, an initiative to create a Livestock Care Standards Board. Our national office has sent us information on the subject. Our friends at other food-related organizations like OEFFA and Local Matters have made their positions clear. We’ve received requests for information about it; people have asked us what our position is, and what we think theirs should be. Our silence on the subject is becoming difficult to sustain. So we thought we should clarify our position.

Slow Food Columbus has no position on Issue 2, except to urge the citizens of Ohio to examine it carefully and to take the time to vote on it.

People on both sides of Issue 2 can agree on one thing:  This is an important issue.  Its implications for good, clean and fair food in Ohio could be very wide-ranging.  It deserves your careful scrutiny and your vote.  Please take the time to do both.

Ark of Taste Tasting at The Hills Market

When Jill Moorhead, the Marketing Director for The Hills Market suggested holding an Ark of Taste tasting event at the store, I don’t think she had any idea what she was letting herself in for. The US Ark of Taste is a catalogue of over 200 foods in danger of extinction, and not surprisingly things in danger of extinction aren’t easy to track down. You can read about Jill’s scavenger hunt on the blog Itinerant Foodies.

To qualify for the US Ark of Taste, food products must be:

• Outstanding in terms of taste—as defined in the context of local traditions and uses.
• At risk biologically or as culinary traditions.
• Sustainably produced.
• Culturally or historically linked to a specific region, locality, ethnicity or traditional production practice.
• Produced in limited quantities, by farms or by small-scale processing companies.

While some of the foods came from such far corners of the country as Vermont, California, Minnesota and Hawaii, many of the ingredients were grown or produced locally. Most of the fresh produce came from the local Wayward Seed Farm. The choice of foods was based partly on availability and transportable and also with a view to what Hills customers might be interested in purchasing in future. Here is the list of foods that we tasted.

Souse – aka Hog’s Head Cheese (Thurn’s, Columbus, Ohio)
Pure Cider Jelly and boiled cider (Woods Cider Mill, Springfield, Vermont)
Jimmy Nardello sweet Italian frying pepper (pickled) (Wayward Seed Farm)
A flight of American artisinal sauerkrauts (Hawthorne Valley Farms, Ghent, NY).
Amish paste tomato (made into soup) (Wayward Seed Farm)
Hawaiian Alaea sea salt,
Gilfeather turnip – roasted with Tupelo honey
Green mountain potatoes – roasted with Tupelo honey
Early blood beets – roasted with Tupelo honey
Tupelo honey (Florida and Georgia)
Manoomin wild rice (Callaway, Minnesota)
Green striped cushaw squash(Sycamore Farm, Piqua, Ohio) – cooked with boiled cider
Pawpaw ice cream (Jeni’s Ice Creams, Columbus, Ohio)
Ground Cherries (Wayward Seed Farm)
Pawpaw autumn harvest chutney (Albany, Ohio)

Jill also managed to procure two Ark of Taste wines (Hitching Post Pinks & Duxoup Charbono) and a non-alcoholic Ark of Taste drink called ’shrub’ which is a colonial era drink made of fruit, vinegar and sugar by Tait Farm Foods in Centre Hall, PA. It comes in a variety of flavors and can also be used in cooking.

Each of the foods has an interesting history and associated food traditions and we were provided with information about each food. For each item we were asked to give feedback on whether we would want to eat it again, or whether we could understand why it was facing extinction. There was certainly a lot of discussion.

Clockwise from top left: Alaea traditional Hawaiian table salt (the color is from red volcanic clay), Jimmy Nardello pepper with souse, cider jelly and ramp crackers, the Gilfeather turnip from Wayward Seed, and the flight of artisanal sauerkrauts.

Wild rice is the only native grain to North America and this was one of the popular dishes. It was a light brown color and different to many of the more commercial wild rices. The pawpaw ice cream, which was served as a float with ginger shrub was also popular.

We are extremely grateful to Jill for such a great idea and for all of her hard work and persistence in tracking down Ark of Taste foods. She was assisted by Jen Burroway, the chef at the Hills Market, who was challenged with coming up with creative uses for all of the varied and not necessarily compatible ingredients.

Ground cherries

More information about these Ark of Taste foods and many more are available on the Ark of Taste website. You can also nominate foods to join the Ark.

Locavore Dinner at the Winery at Otter Creek

Last year the ‘Shake the Hand That Feeds you Dinner‘ at the Flying J Farm was my first Slow Food Columbus event. It was a magical evening, eating al fresco by candle light with convivial company, food from the farm and a master chef working the grill. I secretly feared that the encore could not live up to my memories. I was wrong. Sitting at a candle-lit table overlooking the vineyard at sunset, it was as if we had been magically transported to the Napa valley.

It was not all smooth sailing. Planning a big event never is, but the locavore dinner had more than its fair share of obstacles and logistical complications. In the final days before the event the rain was relentless and the forecast was ominous. Luckily saturday was dry and after a blustery afternoon the wind died down at 5pm precisely and the tablecloths finally stopped threatening to fly away.

There may have been an element of luck with the weather but the fact that the dinner came together with such style is a tribute to Bear and Colleen and their powers of organization, creativity and persistence. The Winery at Otter Creek is a young operation located near Johnstown Ohio with a beautiful hillside setting and as well as providing a stunning setting they supplied a variety of their wines for the dinner.

We started with refreshments and amuse-bouche as we watched the chefs in action and admired the view. The heirloom tomato-water ‘martini’ was a popular choice.

The crostini was one of my favorite things of the evening, goats cheese, pesto, roasted tomatoes, simple but sumptuous, a perfect match of creamy and crispy.

While we were milling around, whetting our appetites, the chefs John and Ryan from Basi Italia were hard at work creating amazing things on the biggest Weber grill you have ever seen.  They were cheerfully assisted by Andrew and Adrienne, who may not have realized what they had let themselves in for.

Above: Free-range Ohio pheasants, shot to order from Mill Creek Pheasant Farm crowding around a pan of spicebush scented sauerkraut with honeycrisp apples. Below: a riot of color – fall squashes, purple potatoes and beauregard sweet potatoes.

I will let the menu speak for itself. It was colorful, seasonal, delicious and a feat of outdoor cooking. The salads were plated but the main course was served family style and an ample supply of fresh bread, home made butter and rillettes added to the abundance.

As well as featuring a wealth of local foods, the dinner incorporated two foods that are both local and Ark of Taste: ground cherries in the autumnal tumble salad and garnishing the martini, and pawpaws in both cheesecake and ice cream form. I have a feeling that a few of the other foods would make excellent candidates. Purple potatoes, spicebush berries?

After the pawpaw festival I thought I might never eat pawpaw again, but these creamy treats enticed me back. I was responsible for the black walnut biscotti, using half of the nuts specified in my usual recipe. They were best dipped in some hot apple cider.

A Slow Food Columbus locavore dinner would not be complete without some pawpaw liqueur and so the more (fool) hardy headed to Flying J farm to set up camp, build a huge campfire and continue the festivities. Chestnuts anyone?

Although the dinner was the brainchild of Bear and Colleen, it would not have been possible without the help, generosity and kindness of so many others. As well as the thank you list below, there were many others who helped out on the night, collecting glasses, clearing plates and scooping ice cream. 

Our chefs, John and Ryan surveying the contented diners. A job well done.

There are more photos on flickr, including shots of our fantastic campfire breakfast.

This post was also posted on hungrywoolf.com

Ark of Taste Tasting at The Hills Market

hillsmarket @SlowFoodCMH Would you like to do an Ark of Taste tasting with us?

I sat staring at the screen, dumbfounded. I had sent out a message on Twitter a few minutes earlier having to do with the Ark of Taste—Slow Food’s signature biodiversity program, a sort of “endangered species program” for local foods in danger of extinction—but I hadn’t really expected any replies, and certainly not so soon.

And certainly not that reply.

Ark foods are rare. Quite rare. With the exception of a few people like Adam and Jaime at The Wayward Seed Farm, farmers don’t seek them out. And we don’t get many of them in Ohio. It would take a lot of digging on the internet by some very dedicated individual, or a lot of talking with distributors and a lot of work by one of Columbus’ premier markets.

And one of Columbus’ premier markets had just dropped me a line.

I toyed with some possible responses.

@hillsmarket hell yes!!

@hillsmarket you're nuts, but we're game if you are.

In the end I ran the idea by the Chapter Board, which was unanimously enthusiastic, and along with Bethia Woolf (hungrywoolf.com) and Jim Ellison (CMH Gourmand) I went to Hills to meet with Jill Moorhead and the Hills Market crew to hash out the details. Jill had assembled a list that ultimately included about twenty different Ark foods, from an overall list of nearly 200—many of which are not currently available anywhere in the Columbus area. A colonial-era beverage called shrub. Creole cream cheese. 8 flavors of sauerkraut. Amish paste tomatoes. Charbono wine. Limited-edition Jeni’s pawpaw-flavored ice cream.

Food. Geek. Heaven.

The only potential snag was the price. Because a lot of these things required going outside of normal distribution channels, shipping would cost more than the items themselves, so the final price tag looked a bit prohibitive. The Chapter Board discussed it and offered to share the cost in order to bring it down to a level that’s not just affordable but compelling: $5 for members and $10 for nonmembers.

October 22. 7 p.m. Hills Market. Call 614-846-3220 to make reservations.

Honoring Farmers

As I was sitting in ZenCha today sipping a cup of High Street Oolong, I was reminded of the first time, in a tea house, that the proprietor had advised me to re-steep the green tea leaves.  I was a little surprised at this advice, since I was concerned that it might become overextracted and bitter… or simply lose its flavor.  But I followed his advice, off and on, and the results weren’t bad.  To be honest, I never really thought much about it.

Then, one day when I’d gotten to know him a bit better, it occurred to me that his advice had been uncharacteristically forthright for such a quiet person, and I started to wonder whether there might not have been something more behind it than I had realized.  So when I overheard him advising another customer to do the same thing, I asked, “Why do you advise people to re-steep their tea?”

His answer was as simple as it was startling:  “It honors the labor of the farmer.”

I’ve re-steeped my tea ever since.

Sitting there today, I found myself wondering how different our culinary traditions would be if we were less conditioned by food as a product and more attuned, at a fundamental level, with the idea of honoring the labor of farmers in everything we do.  The most obvious implication would be less waste—fewer vegetable scraps thrown out, more creativity in using “extra” parts of animals.  But we’d also have more food, more stocks made from those scraps and parts, and perhaps a revival of some of the kinds of food that were popular back when our ancestors ate these foods more from necessity than from choice… perhaps some of them could even serve as inspiration for chefs.

Return of the Locavore Dinner

This, truly, is the event that needs no introduction.

Those of you who remember last year’s locavore dinner at Flying J Farm have been asking us whether it will be happening again. Will Chef John Dornback be cooking again? Will we be having a long dinner table filled with sustainably-raised local meat, delicious fresh bread, and freshly-picked organic produce cooked to perfection? Will we be able to feel the gentle autumn air at our backs as the sun sets over us at the table?

We have some answers for you. And this time, there will be a few surprises.

This is one of them.

For more details, visit our Events page.

Tickets go on sale this Friday at noon, here… as a courtesy, to members only, at first. Tickets for nonmembers, if there are any remaining, go on sale the Friday after that.

If you are a member, you should have received a password by email to use when ordering tickets… but the national office handles membership, we don’t.  If you haven’t received one, contact us a.s.a.p. at events@slowfoodcolumbus.org!