Local Food

An Industry Made From Scratch

July 30, 2015

Noel Weeks majored in religion and the environment in college, studies that led him to start a fledgling organic farm with his family in Leelanau County called Casa Verde.

The 25-year-old and scores of others with diverse and unlikely backgrounds are seizing an opportunity created by the explosion of local food in northern Michigan.

"I think people are definitely becoming a lot more aware of where their food is coming from and I think that has definitely opened up the potential," he said. "With water shortages out west and all that, pretty soon, it will be a necessity to source all food locally."

A SHIFT IN HOW WE THINK ABOUT FOOD

The notion that the best food is local food is a return to the way things used to be, explained Bill Palladino, project director for Taste the Local Difference (TLD), an arm of Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities in Traverse City.

"The lull we’ve had in local food has really only been since the big marketing push of processed food in the ’50s and ’60s," Palladino said. "Before that, we were an agrarian society almost completely. You got your meat from the butcher that got if from a farmer, or sometimes you got it from a farmer."

Decades of accessible, inexpensive processed food left people alienated from what they ate.

"It comes from somebody we don’t know, who handed it to somebody they don’t know, who put it on a truck, who gave it to somebody we don’t know," he said.

Dissatisfaction with this system and its myriad ramifications swelled in the last decade to the point where demand for local food skyrocketed. The phenomenon is especially pronounced in northern Michigan.

AN EXPLOSION OF CHOICES

D.J. Oleson started at his family’s business in the 1960s and remembers when most food was local.

"I used to buy more local produce, more variety of local produce, when I was younger," said Oleson, vice president of Oleson’s Food Stores. "People would bring over what’s left out of their garden and we’d buy it from them, and you just don’t see that much any more."

Oleson finds the recent explosion of local foods remarkable, in particular

the selection of beer and the number of foods processed in the region like hummus, salsa and vodka.

"It’s just the amount of it that’s most surprising to me, how many different items that people keep coming up with and how well it sells," he said.

One of the first local products to get serious traction was beer.

"That was a very quick trend," Palladino said. "Ten years ago, you couldn’t find local beer. Ten years ago, it was Bell’s Brewery and that was it. Now, it’s "˜how local do you want?’ It’s "˜do you want within five miles or do you want within 15?’ It’s an amazing shift."

RECIPE FOR A GOOD ECONOMY

Local food may be fashionable, but the trend isn’t superficial. The economic benefits are undeniable.

"The food travels a lot fewer miles to get here. Generally it uses a lot less resources – environmental, energy resources. It brings money and keeps money in the local community," Palladino said. "If you go to a grocery store and you buy a box of spinach, nine times out of 10 it’s going to come from California and, if you pay $5 for that thing of spinach, out of that five bucks, probably four bucks goes back to California."

Once the money leaves the region, it doesn’t come back, he said. If it stays in the region, it might get spent again and again and again.

Oleson said that beyond the fact that fresh food tastes better, people feel good about buying local.

"I think it’s just helping your neighbor and keeping the money in the local economy, that’s part of it," Oleson said.

Palladino said the local food effect has already boosted the regional economy by spurring restaurants, wineries and microbreweries that attract visitors.

"We’re doing great in terms of the rest of the state," he said. "People look to us from the rest of the country and say, "˜Wow, look what they’re doing up there.’"

I WOULD HAVE JUST LAUGHED

In 2013, a hot topic was whether Traverse City should allow food trucks. Today, the trucks are a beacon for the local food movement.

Simon Joseph opened Traverse City’s first food truck with his wife Rebecca Brown. He’s gone from renegade outsider to institution almost overnight.

The success of Joseph’s Roaming Harvest truck prompted him to open a brick-andmortar restaurant called Harvest in the alley at Union Street between Front and State streets.

Joseph said menus are determined based on what’s fresh and what’s available at the farmers market.

"It really drives what we do," Joseph said.

"When whitefish is in season, we use whitefish. When it’s not in season, we don’t use it."

He estimates 70 percent of his ingredients are local – more in the summer, less in the winter.

"We get asked all the time, "˜where is the food coming from?’" he said. "It’s a pleasure to tell them where it’s coming from."

Joseph is astonished at the success of the food truck scene; there are weeknights when crowds are lined up at all eight trucks parked at The Little Fleet.

"Think about it. Three years ago, when we were just starting and there were no other trucks, if you would have told me that, I would have just laughed," he said.

ADVANTAGES AND CHALLENGES

One of the reasons local food has taken off in northern Michigan is that we are able to grow a wide range of crops.

"We grow enough food within 50 miles of where you and I are sitting to provide everything we could possibly want to eat all year long," Palladino said. "The challenge is a good percent of the population don’t understand that. A lot of them don’t know what to do with the food that we have to eat."

TLD participates in the Food & Farming Network, a consortium working toward the goal of having 20 percent of the region’s diet comprised of local food by 2020.

There are some challenges to achieving this goal. Weeks, the Leelanau farmer, said the price of real estate in Leelanau County makes it hard to start a farm. For Weeks, farming isn’t really making a living. It’s a sun up, sun down labor of love.

"It depends how you define a living. In terms of living above the poverty level, certainly not," he said. "Getting any land, you’re looking at a pretty sizable cost, even if it’s just open acreage – and you don’t just need the land. You need an agriculture well and infrastructure."

The Grand Traverse Regional and Leelanau land conservancies, MSU Extension, Food & Farming Network and other organizations have launched a study to explore ways to ensure affordable land is available for farmers.

What they’ve found is that our region is at a crossroads. Nearly 700 northern Michigan farmers are over 65 years old and 83,466 acres of farmland will change hands when they retire in the next decade.

COOKING CLASSES NEEDED

Another obstacle to expanding local food is found on the consumer end. Many people are accustomed to processed food and don’t know how to cook from scratch.

"We don’t know how to look at a vegetable on the stand and know what to do with it anymore because we’re so used to having it delivered to us already processed," Palladino said.

"So, how can local food survive if people don’t understand what the food is?" TLD and others are working to address this. Grow Benzie, for example, offers cooking classes in Benzonia. The Manistee Community Kitchen runs the nonprofit Iron Works Cafe, which serves breakfast and lunch from local ingredients and holds cooking classes in the evening.

Brandon Seng, director of food programs for Goodwill Industries which helps run the cafe, said it opened in June with the lofty goal of ending hunger and obesity in Manistee and it’s off to a good start.

"We’re just overwhelmed with the support we've seen in the community," Seng said. "Everyone is just so excited about it."

DEFINITION OF LOCAL

People know local food when they see it, but the term lacks a specific definition.

"What our findings have shown is that local is different for everybody," Palladino said.

Sustainable food-maker Food For Thought, for example, uses ingredients from the region. Cherry Capital Foods distributes Michigan-made products. Some local valueadded products, like ERG energy bars or Higher Grounds Trading Co. coffee, require imported ingredients.

"We wish we could buy more local ingredients, but they’re simply not available," said Dennis Bean-Larson, who started ERG with his wife Katy.

Kris Rockwood, owner of Press On Juice in Traverse City, said she wants to use local fruits and vegetables, but finding the mass quantities she needs is challenging.

TLD seeks to address this challenge with their "innovation hub." The hub allows food producers to rent commercial kitchen space they give priority to companies that use local ingredients.

"What we’re trying to do is try to help accelerate businesses that are already in food manufacturing that need a bigger space; they maybe need access to a wholesale distributor like Cherry Capital Foods, they need to be around other people in the food industry to get some support and some education and some camaraderie," Palladino said. "We’re really interested in those businesses that start with something that grows in the earth somewhere here because that has the most economic impact when you look at the total scale of the business."

NEW INGREDIENTS ALL THE TIME

As the local food movement matures, more local ingredients become available. For example, bread makers have long wanted to make local bread, but they’ve been stymied by the lack of local winter wheat, a crop that has traditionally not been grown in the region.

Greg Carpenter of Crooked Tree Breadworks in Petoskey said bakers across the region should soon have increased access to locally grown and milled wheat.

"It is a challenge," Carpenter said. "There are a lot of people that are working on it right now and we may have reached the point of critical mass."

This summer, Crooked Tree bakes local bread every Friday and Carpenter expects his local wheat supply will last through the season. Next year, he hopes to have enough to last through the entire year, and he hopes soon to be able to offer local bread two days per week.

This year’s wheat was grown on a test plot on a farm near Petoskey. Carpenter mills the wheat himself and said his Local Loaf contains just three ingredients.

"It’s a very simple loaf of bread, designed to allow the user to taste the local grain in its purest form," he said. "We sell out every Friday."

SELLING OUT AT THE FARMERS MARKET

Sometimes, the absence of local products proves their popularity.

At Oleson’s, local liquor is hard to keep in stock.

"Some of it’s getting kind of hard to get because the demand’s so high," Oleson said.

Some vendors at the Sara Hardy Downtown Farmers Market in Traverse City can’t keep up with demand, said Nick Viox, special projects coordinator at the Downtown Development Authority.

A woman who makes pesto using local basil and oils found her product too popular to keep up with demand.

"She said she was swooped up by some restaurants and unfortunately she couldn’t accommodate our market," Viox said. "She hopes to grow more basil next year."

The Sara Hardy Farmers Market also helps create more consumers of local food.

The market accepts vouchers from low-income food assistance programs. In 2014, nearly $50,000 was spent at the market through the programs.

"We’re not only introducing the people to these really great fresh local food items, but we’re also introducing our farmers to these new customers," he said.

GROW SLOWLY

Weeks said the 10-acre Casa Verde farm outside Cedar is making its first foray into commercial farming this year. They have one acre in production right now and they hope to double that next year. They are also working on getting certified organic.

This year they’ve signed on to supply vegetables to Press On Juice and they hope to distribute some produce through Cherry Capital Foods.

"We want to grow slowly because, even though there are a lot of markets out there, I feel like we have to establish good relationships," Weeks said.