DougOLis question to Juan’s last post was so on-point that I thought I’d post it, along with my response, here on the front page.

Doug writes:

I don’t mean to be a huge negative nancy because I greatly admire and love what you guys do, but how exactly is getting produce from Central California (via Santa Monica) considered local? I tend to think of local as anything within 100 miles or so. Isn’t that kind of like Alice Waters, someone else I admire, pushing the local movement but still getting produce from Chino Farms? I have to think the environmental impact is far greater as well.

My response:

Hi Doug,

Thanks for asking, I think there’s a lot of confusion and different thoughts out there about what it means to support “local” food. My short answer is to link to a past post which addresses a lot of your question: The Opposite of Universal.

Our additional answer is this:

We believe in buying local for reasons of both quality and community, and as such we buy a lot of our produce and products from local farmers and artisans.

For the same reasons of quality and community, we also believe in buying from small independent farmers and artisans, whose love infuses the products they grow and is carried to those of us who consume them. In that vein we buy a lot of products from independent peoples in other parts of California and we buy pork from a few small farmers in Iowa.

Together, local farmers/artisans and independent farmers/artisans from other regions provide most of our produce and all of our meat, along with most of our beer and wine. I believe that the quality and care that comes from buying ingredients like this shows over time in a better experience, and a better restaurant.

What we’re trying to do in terms of supporting real food and farming and community works best when our food is world class, and with our sourcing we are getting ingredients of the quality.

(As far as environmental footprint goes, rest assured that the environmental and social damage wrought by industrial farming, wherever it occurs, is far worse than the carbon footprint of transporting good food overland. The idea that it’s better for us to buy factory farmed cattle from the Imperial Valley than pastured beef from San Luis Obispo is a canard designed to prop up the inherently unsustainable enterprise of raising California cattle on Midwest corn.)

Because there is limited local independent farming, a San Diego restaurant that is 100% local would look quite different than ours. Among the items that (as far as I know — and there’s a lot I don’t know) are not available at high quality, in quantities to support a busy city restaurant are: grains (so no bread, rice, tortillas, etc); pork; stone fruit such as peaches, apricots, etc; blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries; asparagus; bean, potatoes. Also other “staple” items like corn and tomatoes are available in much more limited seasons in San Diego than if you include some nearby regions.

Sea Rocket and Spread are, I think, more completely local than us. I don’t know the details of Spread’s procurement, but Sea Rocket specifically chose a format for their restaurant which would allow them to be mostly local, which I think is awesome. If you look at their menu, though, you will see certain items (pinquito beans, rice) they source from other regions.

A couple restaurants I know that I’d say are truly local — getting almost all their products from the surrounding area — are Laja in Guadalupe Valley outside of Ensenada, and Farm 255 in Athens, GA.

I love both of these restaurants, and have spent a lot of time learning about how they work. In both cases, the restaurant is tied directly to its own farm, so the operation itself is able to change what it grows to meet the needs of the restaurant. In both cases, too, the menu is much smaller than a place like ours — about a dozen items at Farm 255 and eight at Laja.

Also, both Georgia and the Guadalupe Valley have a strong culture of small farming, a regulatory environment that makes it easier to buy meat from small farms, and a the necessary infrastructure to connect small farms to the community.

I’m don’t believe the knowledge and enthusiasm for local food in our area is strong enough yet to support a city restaurant like ours with a limited menu and no staples (i.e., you can only get a burger when there has been enough rain to grow enough grass to support cattle, and you can’t get pork or grains at all). But we are trying to help get it there.

Similarly, we’re not in a position to buy our own farm yet, but we are aiming to in the future. And at that point we can grow a lot of what we think we can’t buy locally.

Most importantly, our goal is to turn people on to independently grown food from our region and others, and to show that people are willing to pay the extra price of unsubsidized, nonfactory food because of its goodness. If we prove that, then local people who are thinking of farming will be confident there will be a market, and they will be able to start more new farms. Basically, we’re trying to create a market for locally farmed products. If we do so, they will then come to exist.

Last week we went to visit a local farm that the farmer started knowing that we, at least, would be able to buy some of his product. I’ll have a blog post up about that soon.