In accord, from farm to table
By Alex Pulaski, The Oregonian
Tuesday, March 7, 2006
Tyler Jones is a farmer who put off finishing his history degree because he'd rather raise bees, pasture cattle and fence pigs in the woods.
Matt Allen is an executive chef on a four-year odyssey from frozen french fries and mass-slaughterhouse cattle to heirloom potatoes and beef raised on grass, with no hormones or antibiotics.
The two met Monday morning, in the midst of dozens of other new conversations between those who grow and raise food in Oregon and Southwest Washington, and those who put it on restaurant tables, in buffet lines and on store shelves. They talked at the Clackamas County Fairgrounds in Canby at the Farmer-Chef Connection, which has grown from nearly 70 attendees when it began in 2001 to about 275 Monday.
Sponsored by nonprofit Ecotrust and the Portland chapter of the Chefs Collaborative, the one-day event spawned four such regional connections in Washington last year and is expected to branch into California in 2007. The idea is to promote locally grown food and sustainable agricultural practices.
Jones, 25, has kept bees since he was 9 but began raising animals in earnest three years ago. He has been able to establish sales with a handful of restaurants near his Corvallis home but hopes to expand into the Portland market.
His biggest hurdle now isn't finding buyers, he says, but being able to afford to buy land when he outgrows two family parcels.
Allen, executive chef at the Tualatin Country Club, has been steering purchases away from large institutions and toward smaller growers and ranchers. He's stuck on freshness, higher quality and local support --but recognizes it costs more money and time to shop with a number of small vendors instead of one or two big ones.
And sometimes, when you're cooking for 400, you just have to shop big, he says.
"When you start buying meat from two or three producers for the same meal, sometimes there's a break in continuity," he said.
But for day-to-day purchases Allen says there's nothing like going local --a message he is trying to convey to the club's members.
"I try to let them know that the berries we use come from down the road and not from California," he said.
The conference is having a measurable effect for some growers. In the past four years, said Tanya Murray, restaurant accounts manager for Sauvie Island Organics, the farm's sales to restaurants have more than doubled. She said restaurants account for nearly one-quarter of the farm's business.