Roots
Considering the Origins of What We Consume

Essay by Colin McEnroe| Photo by Jeff Kellner

On a weeknight in March, I found myself in the produce aisle at Whole Foods. I was hefting a bulb of celery root. Celery root is an ugly vegetable, even by tuber standards, but I was introduced to it a few summers ago by somebody from Hall’s Farm in north Simsbury. I frequently bought it from Hall’s and put it in various “mashed medleys” I like to make that involve local potatoes, rutabagas, sweet potatoes and, yes, celery root.

I hadn’t bought any in quite a while, partly because I don’t think George Hall grew any last season. But here was one. Maybe I would buy it. My eyes strayed down to the sign that noted price and point of origin. The root came from China. China. Think about that. Someone had sent this nasty-looking root 8,000 miles so that a bored amateur cook in West Hartford could buy it. This brainless knob had more frequent flier miles than I do.

I put it back.

I just can’t participate in that system anymore.

After a long-term casual love affair with Connecticut farmer’s markets, last summer I morphed, noisily, into a semi-annoying serious locavore. A locavore is somebody who tries to eat what is grown nearby. There are lots of good reasons to do this: The food is fresher. The beautiful farms whose sights and smells and sounds we cherish can only survive if we support them. More energy is put into growing it than into shipping it insane distances, which is not always the case with the stuff in the stores.

After all, the real accomplishment embodied in that hunk of celery root was not that somebody grew it, but that it somehow got here. It seemed possible that it had already consumed more than its weight in petroleum.

I try to eat food from around here, which is not easy in the winter. You’d be surprised how much meat and dairy is produced here in Connecticut, but it’s not always easy to get. There are winter farmer’s markets in New Haven, Fairfield and New London, but so far, nothing has come together in central Connecticut.

The problem with being a locavore is that, once the idea catches fire in your mind, you get grumpy and depressed when you can’t act on it. You want to eat good stuff from the area farms, but it’s also sort of counterproductive to be driving all over the state looking for grass-fed beef and lamb.

You could, however, do that. There’s a guy in Stonington working a farm that has been producing since 1654 without missing a crop, and he grows the kind of eight-row white corn (for cornmeal) that the Connecticut Native Americans grew before the white folks showed up. There’s an amazing summer market in Lyme where, if you get there early, you can buy fish from the Stonington fleet and amazing field greens for the accompanying salad. There’s a store called The Smithy in New Preston, specializing in local and sustainable products.

The Red Bee Studio in Weston sells all kinds of apiary products, and Goat Boy Soaps in New Milford makes soap with a goat milk base for, um, locawashers. Localavatories?

The easiest local product to buy, by the way, is milk. Never buy anything but the Farmer’s Cow brand, which is Connecticut milk, sold in both supermarkets and gourmet stores. You like those lovely meadows and pastures around here? You gotta keep them in business.

There are, behind a lot of this activity, amazing people, too.

Tim Cipriano, the food services director in Bloomfield, has not only introduced local produce into school lunches but also has some of the students growing the food. They’re even farming tilapia, a fish that can be raised in tanks. Chef Emily Brooks in Washington is working to get local foods into area senior centers. Working with the state Department of Agriculture, restaurants like the Firebox in Hartford and the Good News Café in Woodbury make a specialty out of putting local foods on the menu. The Department’s media relations coordinator, Linda Piotrowicz works, as far as I can tell, without sleep or vacation to get the news out about all this stuff; and there’s a quarterly called Edible Nutmeg that publishes exclusively on locavore topics.

There’s some pretty strong national sentiment behind this idea, too. Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food, a compactly written argument for eating real, recognizable foods as close to where they’re grown as possible, spent several weeks as the No.1 New York Times nonfiction bestseller.

And yet …and yet …

It’s still too much of a scavenger hunt, running around after this stuff, except during the peak season from, say, July to October, when the farmer’s markets are everywhere. And even that takes some planning and some actual knowledge of the hours of the markets. The push to buy local foods is kind of smacking up against the way people live today – which is less and less on any kind of fixed clock. We expect to be able to buy almost any kind of food, in almost any kind of season, at almost any time of day or night.

But you miss a lot, living that way. Buying from the farms and the farmer’s markets, you get to know the farmers. And you come to know the stories behind your food. A jar of honey starts to mean a little more when the farmer tells you a bear wrecked his hives that morning. You’re less likely to waste an admittedly somewhat more expensive bunch of organic carrots if you’ve just spoken to the person who pulled them.

I’ve tried gently nudging one solution toward the mighty leaders in Hartford: a readjustment of the (currently stalled) Front Street retail area next to the Connecticut Convention Center. At least part of that project should be an indoor food concourse where tourists could pick up Connecticut wine, syrup, honey, wool items and cookbooks to take home and where central Connecticut foodies could stop in for local beef, lamb, hormone-free poultry, eggs, flowers, artisan cheeses, breads, teas, herbs and any kind of produce that’s remotely in season.

This would include, during the winter, greens growing hydroponically or in greenhouses or under plastic covers in fields. All of that is done around here, and cooks covet the stuff but don’t know where to get it. Brooks, who has spent years studying this subject, tells me that growers will always grow more of what they can actually sell.

My imaginary food concourse (a smaller version of the million-square-foot Chelsea Market in an old New York City biscuit factory) would also include a few smaller versions of legendary local restaurants, like Carbone’s, and revivals of lost icons, like Honiss’s Oyster House, which opened in 1815 and was the stuff of legend for more than 150 years and maybe Scoler’s Deli, a long-gone Hartford political hang-out.

Seeping out, like hamburger juices, from the Proustian vault of my own memory is the old Lincoln Dairy in West Hartford, where you bought hamburgers that were wrapped up in wax paper. You jumped into your father’s Corvair and tried to get home before the juices seeped out.

At my imaginary Front Street market, those hamburgers are made from the grass-fed beef of Nunzio Corsino’s Four Mile River Farm or Laurel Ridge in Litchfield.

To a certain kind of person, the preceding seems like way too much fuss over personal fuel. Food is just something to keep you going, right?

But going where? And to do what?

Spring is upon us. Soon the asparagus and rhubarb will push up through the earth and start the season. Spinach and lettuce will be up soon. Slow down. Chew your food a little more. Notice what it is and where it comes from. Occasionally visit the farms and linger a while. Make a habit of the farmer’s markets and talk to your neighbors there. Fill up your basket and spend part of Saturday afternoon cooking something nice. It’ll cost a little more than the cheap stuff in the stores, but if you make more careful use of what you buy, it’ll even out. (How many of those stupid fake little baby carrots did you throw out last year?)

And Sunday, when you go out with your kayak or your bike, remember that you’re part of a cycle that keeps the fish in streams and keeps the birds flying over those country roads. Growing food, raising bees, preserving land, pruning trees, staying connected in small ways. If we take good care of it all, we’ll live in Paradise.

Colin McEnroe is a writer and host of an afternoon radio program on WTIC-AM.