04/29/08 Choosing to Eat Local

Choosing to Eat Local. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. We like to eat out every once in a while and we do have our favorite restaurants. Rarely do I go to a chain restaurant. We recently had the opportunity of trying a wonderful restaurant in Hood River. Don't get me wrong. This is not a restaurant review although it was quite good; the key ingredient that makes the Celilo Restaurant is the word  local. MEYER: My partners and I ran the Sixth Street Bistro which is a restaurant that we shifted over to something that people would refer to as a sustainable format back in about 1998. And a lot of that was go green to save money which really ended up saving a lot of money but it also got us thinking about where our food came from and we realized we could get better product from a closer area if we just contracted directly with the ag community. That's partner Maui Meyer. The new restaurant was a step up in foods and preparation. MEYER: We tend to take our sub-prime cuts and fabricate them out into all of our courses and that lends itself to things that you can make into sausage and things that you can make into meat sauces and great stocks and all these wonderful accessories that your just don't see because you are so used to buying the steak cut and packed in plastic. Restaurateurs usually wind up getting most of their food stuffs from one or two suppliers who get the individual products from a down line. Getting local suppliers on board was a lot less difficult than you might think. MEYER: There's a lot of people out there who are happy to work really hard for you, come in with their seed catalogs, let you pick what breed their going to raise this year what type of stock they're going to raise and sell it to you for a pretty competitive price. All things considered when you cut out the middle man you can get pretty close. More and more restaurants in the area have gone to a local product menu which while that means more competition Meyer sees it as an upside for the producers who can sell more of their products in the market. Celilo Restaurant was also built with a local minded mentality. MEYER: We became big fans of this idea of LEED building, L-E-E-D, and so we built our building to LEED Silver and the interior to LEED Gold and there's a regional component with that, there's a recycled component with that; there's a local artisan component with that. Oh, and yes. The food was wonderful and I felt pretty good about being able to support not only the local community but the local ag producer as well. Many more restaurants should take notice. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.