Best Food Writing 2013 by Holly Hughes Page B

often laments the years he missed in the cause. “I’m 20 years late to this,” he says. I hear something of Alice Waters’s ethos in his words, particularly when he says that it’s not enough to “serve something good.”
    The “aim of all this,” he says, “should be to connect the diner to something larger”—in his case, an appreciation of the Chesapeake, “our Yellowstone, our national treasure.” But more broadly, an understanding of where our food is grown and by whom, and a curiosity about how our choices—our dollars—affect the system. “At Woodberry,” he says, “we use the restaurant to sell the local products. Conversely, a lot of restaurants are using local to sell the restaurant.”
    It’s not Gjerde’s fidelity to a high-church standard of purity thatimpresses me. It’s his understanding of the idea that dinner at a restaurant is a complex interplay of many people, only one of whom is the chef. And that a restaurant has a responsibility to the larger culture.
    Perhaps this is why Gjerde doesn’t exult over what he has accomplished but continues to torture himself with how he should be doing so much more.
    I tell him this sounds like a definition for neuroticism.
    Gjerde laughs. “I don’t see how you can be engaged in this thing and not be like that.”
    The Purist’s Dilemma
    Local has achieved a status unthinkable to many of its earliest adherents, a fact that causes some of them, such as civil-rights warriors or women’s-rights advocates, to wax nostalgic over their progress even as they lament that local doesn’t mean as much as it once did.
    When she opened Cashion’s Eat Place in 1995, Ann Cashion says, she took her cues in the kitchen from what her purveyors had on hand, buying whole animals and butchering them herself. The off-cuts were troubling to diners; they wanted the chops. They were dismayed at paying top dollar for something they considered scraps, and they couldn’t understand her capriciousness—why she kept yanking the chops from the menu.
    Cashion is a supporter of Bev Eggleston, who has so often been described as patron saint of the local-food movement that he himself invokes the term, albeit mockingly, in conversation. Eggleston was featured in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and there are seemingly as many mentions of his name on menus in Washington as there are beet-and-goat-cheese salads. As recently as five years ago, EcoFriendly Foods, Eggleston’s company, sold only whole animals to chefs, but because of growing demand, he recently made parts available to his 50 or so clients from Virginia to New York, having decided “we can’t live by our ideals as this point.”
    He explains: “I’m not as eco-friendly as I would like to be. I wouldn’t even call us sustainable—I’d call us resourceful.” He uses the analogy of a relationship, citing the compromises necessary to keep a connection going, and says compromise is a reality for many of his clients, too.
    Many chefs want to “do the right thing,” Eggleston says, but they’re under pressure from their bosses who “want to fly the flag of local,” yet they bristle at the increase in food costs. Under those conditions, it’s easier to “just buy the parts and never even consider the whole animal and what it can do for you.”
    Cashion suggests this is simply the new reality. The new local. And though it represents progress on the one hand—more high-quality products are on menus than ever before, and that, she says, “improves life for everyone”—on the other hand she thinks something is definitely missing.
    What is that?
    She pauses for a long moment, then launches into an elegant and impassioned statement of the local ideal, of the give-and-take between chef and farmer, the sense of mutual