Slow Food Columbus Blog

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!

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.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.

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!

Central Ohio’s fall harvest will occasion not one but two celebrations of local food this year. The first will be the Department of Agriculture’s Local Food Challenge, September 13-19, during which Director Robert Boggs challenges residents to “plan and prepare one meal every day using fresh, nutritious foods that are made, grown, or raised here in our state.” Events include a cooking demo at the Pearl Market on Tuesday featuring local chefs; if the rumors are true, the chef at the demo will be someone at the “Tip Top” of his profession….

The second week will be Local Matters’ Local Food Week, October 3-9, which kicks off on the 3rd with the Market to Market Ride, a bicycle ride from the North Market to Hills Market along the Olentangy River. Breakfast will be available at either market. (And for those who want a full day of local-food goodness, the 3rd is also the date of our annual Locavore Dinner in Johnstown, complete with overnight camping—so once you’ve fueled up at Hills, you could just keep going….)

When it comes to pawpaws, the need for education is apparent. Most people have never even seen one, and when you do a Google image search you get photographs of pawpaws, papayas, some durian-like spiky fruit, and the occasional dog. (Seriously.)

Pawpaws are not papayas. They’re a surprisingly tropical-tasting fruit, sort of a cross between a banana and a mango, with flesh the consistency of custard when they’re fully ripe. Chilled, they were one of George Washington’s favorite desserts. They are also a Slow Food Ark of Taste product, meaning that they are endangered by the industrialization of food: because they bruise easily and ripen quickly, they are less appealing to the food industry than (say) the hardy Cavendish banana. But they have few natural predators, require no pesticides, grow locally… and they’re delicious.

Pawpaw season is upon us, and one of the very best places in the world to sample pawpaws is at the Pawpaw Festival in Lake Snowden, OH. There will be many varieties available to sample and compare. Pawpaw experts, including Slow Food Betsy Lydon Award winner Neal Peterson and Integration Acres’ Chris Chmiel, will be present. There will be other activities too, but the pawpaws are the main attraction.

Join us for breakfast at the Northstar Café in the Short North on Saturday, September 19 at 9:00 a.m., where we will compare notes on how long everyone wants to stay and then carpool or caravan down to the Festival, leaving at 10 and arriving before noon. We will stay until late afternoon, during which time we will cheer on fearless leader Colleen and Hungrywoolf author Bethia, who will be official pawpaw judges at the festival. Those interested in doing so will most likely linger afterward for dinner in nearby Athens. Anyone interested in camping overnight should contact Bethia using the link on the Events page.

Not surprisingly, Slow Food Columbus has from the start had lots of contact with Columbus-area food bloggers. As the city’s arbiters of culinary excellence and intrepid explorers of everything from auberges and bistros to tapas bars and taco trucks, they inspire us, inform us, and often even feed us. They’re one of the best things about the city. It’s hard to believe that they do it just for the sheer joy of doing it.

Well, now you can have the pleasure of getting to know them too. Because no fewer than six of these folks—Jim Ellison from CMH Gourmand, Nick Dekker from Breakfast With Nick, Rose Rings from Bitchin’ in the Kitchen, Dave Scarpetti from weber_cam and Dave’s Beer, Bethia Woolf of Hungrywoolf’s Food Blog, and Becke Boyer from Columbus Foodie—will be at Wild Goose Creative on Summit Street this Sunday, September 6, at 7 p.m. to talk about what they do and offer up samples of food that represent their specialty.

Click here for more details, and come out to say hi. You’ll be glad you did.

Local ground cherries

As Time Magazine’s excellent lead story about the high costs of cheap, industrial food hits the stands and Local Matters’ Local Food Week in Columbus draws near, it is worth reflecting for a moment on the meaning of local food.

The locavore movement arose at a time when “local” meant not just “from nearby” but also “made by our neighbors,” “sustainable” and “not industrial.” As concepts go, it was the perfect storm of progressive foodie goodness: in one word it connoted fresh taste, a low carbon footprint and good farming practices, and appealing social values.

It wasn’t long, however, before the food industry caught on to the fact that something with this much appeal could be profitable—so now, Frito-Lay is rolling out “Local Lay’s,” potato chips made from local potatoes, and ConAgra has started promoting the local provenance of its Hunt’s tomatoes (at least around its Oakdale, California, facility).

As a result of developments such as these, local food fans will increasingly be forced to ask themselves what they mean when they support local food. Read the rest of this entry »