Charlottesville Food by Casey Ireland Page A

Charlottesville. We had hoped it would become a place for people to have conversations about food, and it did, but the character of those conversations was more often belligerent than convivial. How can you possibly think this restaurant is good/bad? How can you claim to know anything about food given that you’ve never been professionally trained? And, most pertinently, why would you patronize an establishment that makes no effort to source its ingredients locally?
    It was this last question that hinted at an answer to the earlier question. Any issues of pragmatism wrapped up in the local food movement—fresher produce, support for the local economy, reduction of energy consumption by shortening distances between producers and consumers—have been moralized in the extreme, glorifying those who source and eat their ingredients locally and vilifying the rest.
    To an extent, this is not surprising. Energy and the economy are powerfully charged, highly politicized issues. But it goes deeper than that. “Local” has come to be a synonym for other values as well. “Healthy” is one. We’re worried that food corporations are more concerned about the bottom line than our bodies, piping in all kinds of chemical preservatives and flavor enhancers to make sure we buy what they sell, such that it feels wiser to eat a local biscuit with local bacon than a corporate salad with foreign fruit. Is it actually healthier to do so? Maybe, maybe not. In the paraphrased words of one of our readers, “If I’m going to go prematurely, I’ll take a heart attack while eating a local breakfast sandwich over cancer from a fast-food salad any day of the week!”
    This points to another modern synonym of “local,” which is “trustworthy.” Local farmers could be engaging in all kinds of sadistic, immoral practices just around the bend, but we trust that they’re not. They’re our neighbors and friends. Surely they’re looking out for us more than the faceless executives just trying to make a buck. Right?
    â€œSlow” is another one. Many people talk about the “Slow Food movement” and the “local food movement” in the same breath. In this age of fast food—and “fast casual”—and instantaneous communication with people around the world, we are feeling agile but fatigued, connected but disconnected. Local food promises old(er)-fashioned techniques, fewer ingredients, a simpler and purer experience, with that guy over there who has some good chickens and that family over there with all the goat cheese–producing goats. Pull up a chair, my friend, and let me get you a plate of food. We’ll drink a beer from the brewery right around the corner and talk about old times.
    Putting aside issues of whether fast-food salads really are carcinogenic, whether local farmers really care less about making money than corporate execs and all the other complex dynamics at play here, we can see in the good-natured debate between Portland locals and Charlottesville locals a contraction of the ever-expanding universe. We have now collectively realized the insane dream of being able to video chat with someone in the Himalayas in real-time, both of us drinking a Coke and eating chicken McNuggets. The spectacle of brand colonialism—walking off a rickety plane in the middle of nowhere in a far-off country to see a Coke umbrella—has lost its luster, if it ever had any. The thing that is special about us is the thing you can’t get anywhere else. The people, the food and drink, the history of this place and the experiences to be had right here and now. These are the knowable things, the raw materials of our very being, and they can’t be bought or sold anywhere else.
    â€”Jed Verity
    Charlottesville, Virginia
    November 2013

Acknowledgements
    This book is the result of the encouragement and opportunities given to me by Jed Verity and Erin