On ingredients and organics
By Jamie | July 4th, 2010
A raspberry from the kitchen garden at the Biltmore Estate. I promptly ate it after shooting this photo.
In our circle of friends Vance and I are known as these “great chefs,” but to accept that designation would be mostly cheating. Because more often than not we’re following someone else’s recipe, and what makes the food great isn’t that we made it but that we’ve taken care to put only quality ingredients into what we make. If you’re someone who believes sorbitol and hexametaphosphate make a nutritious and appetizing equivalent to real maple syrup, you should probably skip this post.
I love to eat. And it is for that reason that I love to cook. Don’t get me wrong; I’ll happily drop $30 a person for a great meal at a local restaurant. But I’m happiest when I know exactly where the food I’m eating came from — farm to table. I still go to the grocery store — one of my favorite things is to wander there as if I’m in some kind of edible amusement park — but I buy primarily from the perimeter of the store where the produce and dairy are found. I’ve adopted a food mantra straight out of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Everything we consume has a story behind it. A tomato isn’t just a tomato. It’s a farm somewhere in Florida dumping thousands of gallons of pesticides and insecticides and fungicides into the groundwater. It’s a seed producer, a planter, a grower and a picker. It’s a truck driver and an ethylene gas application. It’s a sticker designer and a sticker applier, a grocery store stock worker and a plastic produce bag.
