Eating Disorder

May 11th, 2008

The one question people kept asking me on my eating tour of Canada: when you dine in a restaurant, how do you know if you’re getting good local food? I kind of wish they hadn’t asked.

I suppose I am in a position to answer, having written a book about farming and regional foods, Apples to Oysters: A Food Lover’s Tour of Canadian Farms.

And it’s an easy enough question to answer. I tell them, you can assume you’re not getting good local food unless that restaurant places the farmer’s name on the menu beside the ingredient. Or, at the very least, the restaurant should list the region the food comes from and how the food is raised.

Of course, it’s the rare and very special dining room that carries local fare. And now, after traveling across Canada for the past three weeks searching for those restaurants, my zeal for meals with providence, for fare raised by local quality-conscious farmers, has begun to feel a bit like an eating disorder.

But perhaps some disorders develop for a reason? I’m glad others before me obsessed over clean dishes and pots and hands in restaurant kitchens so that I don’t have to. Me? I merely want clean meals from clean agriculture, rather than foods injected with growth hormones, antibiotics, genetically modified organisms, pesticides... I want food ripened in a field, rather than in a truck.

And I want restaurants to credit farm regions and farmers on the menu, to recognize good farmers as their partners, their chefs of the soil.

And then I can eat happily.