What does it mean to be local?

An example:  I've been using Tom's of Maine's toothpaste for years.  Tom's was started by Tom and Kate Chappell in Kennebunk, Maine in the 1970's.  The personal care products company grew and now employs 150 people. In 2006, Colgate-Palmolive purchased an 84% interest in the company for 100 million dollars.

Before we go cursing C-P for their wisdom in acquiring the quality and conscientiousness that Tom's represents, remember that William Colgate started making soap in NYC in 1806.  The Palmolive company began in the midwest ninety years later. Now the combined company has an annual revenue of 15.5 billion U.S. dollars made from international sales of soap, personal care products, and pet foods.  They employ 39,000 people.

Colgate-Palmolive's biggest competitor is another American-born company: Proctor and Gamble.  Since its Ohio start 150 years ago, P & G is a global dominator in its industry with annual sales of 82 billion and employs 129,000 people.

Do I love Tom's because they are from Maine?  Do I hate them because they sold out to a company from New York?  Should I hate the big guys solely because they are big?  Should I love the small guys just because they are small?  Because they hustle and suffer in a different way than than the big companies do?   When I patronize the small companies, isn't it with the hope that they will thrive and prosper and eventually, perhaps, be bought out for 100 million dollars?  Isn't that what we all secretly dream of for our small endeavors?  Am I cursing Colgate-Palmolive just because they are successful enough to  have sales in over 200 countries?  Am I cursing them because they didn't hire me and take me with them on their trip to global wealth?

The answers are unclear on some of these.

But what I know is that sometimes I need to purchase soap.

When she comes to town on Fridays during the summer and fall, I can buy bath soap from the lady who runs Black Hen Farm in Braintree.  She makes a really great product and sells it at my local farmer's market.  I am happy to buy it and feel that something I am going to wash myself with is worth the $4.50 per bar price.  Alas, I can't let my children use it because they will leave it melting in a bathtub of water and it will be gone in one bath; they only get water, which is after all, the universal solvent.

But back to the farmer's market.  No one sells liquid dish washing soap there, so sometimes I order a five gallon bucket of Castille soap from Vermont Soap.  Its a bit of an investment, but I can use it for dishes and general cleaning at the house, and handwashing and cleaning at the restaurant.    When I buy it, I don't need to shop for it again anytime soon, which is a pleasant feature of bulk purchasing.  Sometimes I purchase products from one of two environmentally friendly, smaller American companies that are carried by my favorite grocery store.  Sun and Earth is from Pennsylvania.  Are they local?  Are they small?  They are private and located in my country, which I think is good. Another Vermonter, is Seventh Generation, also still a private company with annual sales creeping into the hundreds of millions. That's more revenue than I take in by quite a bit, but I bet everyone there on the shores of Lake Champlain works hard, and their expenses have to be pretty high as well.

Laundry is a little more tricky.  I prefer dry soap to liquid soap that comes in those giant plastic bottles.  We do a lot of laundry.  I (perhaps wrongly) feel that I am being gypped by purchasing a fluid product, so I buy a powder without perfumes or colors that comes in a cardboard box that I can put in my recycling stream. Arm and Hammer owned by Church and Dwight Company of Princeton, New Jersey is often the winner of my imperfect grocery store struggle to unite my wallet and my ethics - as well as my washing machine which prefers the high-efficiency of liquid soap.  Church and Dwight is another world player.  However I did just purchase some more Vermont Soap, so maybe I'll use that for keeping my socks clean and fresh for a while.


A lot of talk, a lot of thinking, eventually some personal and house cleaning, but where have we gotten?

It seems that where I put my effort is in BUY LOCAL.  I'm not perfect at it, because sometimes things aren't available, are too hard to find or, are just too darn expensive for how I use them.  But if the price isn't too far above convential big-company products, and I don't have to spend $15 in gas money to get the item, I am willing to purchase from my local small entrepreneur.  In doing so, I support my neighbors and fellow citizens with their success, which helps them to have a little spare cash to help support me with mine.

Lets face it.  The CEO of Dwight and Church will not notice if I stop buying his product (although he might if I stopped, and you stopped, and he stopped, and she stopped...) So I don't concern myself with my impact on him.  Now that Kate and Tom are all set, they don't need my support so much either, so the next time a new toothpaste crosses my path from a less global company I may well shift my allegiance away from Tom's or Colgate or whomever they are.  That way I can invest in the next new thing and support local entrepreneurialism.

Whatever I do, I hope I stop and take a few minutes to think before I do it.

Today I ponder chickens and their eggs.

When I first came to Sterling, I got my eggs from Hannah's Hens up on Tuttle Road.  But only because it was convenient.  My travels often took me up near the Heywood Reservoir (a beautiful place of public recreation, for those of you who haven't been there - just ask, I'll relay directions).

Now, alas, I don't go that way so often.  I did without fresh eggs for a time, then chased a few people who had chickens in order to get their eggs, but there was something erratic and difficult about that as well.  It just doesn't work to travel a 12 mile round trip for nothing besides eggs.

Now, I get eggs from my neighbor down the street, and if I forget to pick them up, he drops them off.  You can't really get much more convenience than that.

The neighbor raises chickens in a cage.  It is a big cage, with a house attached, and lots of indoor leg room and roosting options as well as outdoor space.  The chickens follow each other into the hen house and back out into the court yard from which they have plucked every blade of grass.  My neighbor tried to leave the birds loose, but foxes and coyotes in the neighborhood significantly shorten the life span of a chicken. 


At my neighbor's house, I watched a hen snatch a dragonfly out of the air.  The insect was so huge that the wings hung out on each side of the hen's beak, and the head stuck out in front.  The clever bird who had captured the unfortunate odonata was unable to open its beak to reposition for fear of the dragonfly escaping into the mouths of her avian sisters who were chasing her around the pen trying to get a piece of that goodness.  Eventually, the first bird found a private place to figure out how to swallow her lunch, and all the rest went back to scratching around for worms and snacks.  This is what I imagine happy chickens to look like.

The eggs from these birds are huge, come in three colors and are rich-looking and very, very fresh.

Back at the Harvest Grille, we had to work to find eggs in a different way.  Eventually, we stocked up on cage free eggs from Maine. Kind of local, but kind of far as well.

My discussions with people as we renovated the restaurant suggested that egg quality was an important issue.  My partner groused at the cost of the eggs, and said we would not survive for very long if we priced the eggs fairly.  So we decided that we would leave it to the customers to decide what we carried.   We put both on the menu and priced them just under what they should cost.

It proved surprising, then, when not so many folks came out for the eggs from the happy chicken.

We have had some customers applaud the presence of the happy eggs, but mostly, people prefer to pay for conventionally raised chicken eggs. On the other hand, there is great interest in the teriaki-marinated, antibiotic-free, free-range grilled chicken breast (is that a Tari-mari-free-free bird?)

One month in a new menu isn't really enough time to fully test my theory, but it seems already clear that the chicken is more important than the egg to most consumers.

And this makes my life easy, because we will of course continue to provide happy-chicken eggs to our customers who want them - even if they are few.   And that means my dragonfly-eating neighboring chicken will be doing the work.

How much more local can you get?

Beautiful glass and lovely paintings

It is funny how we have all gotten so busy these days that we don't have much time to savor the most important parts of life:  eating good food and enjoying good company.

Here at the Harvest Grille, we have made a space for you, our friends and our soon-to-be-friends, to savor the moment with the good food and good company you will find here.  In creating this space, we are so grateful to glass artist Will D'Errico  of Shelburne Falls and mixed media artist George Sampson of Worcester for providing our starting look.

We hope you will enjoy it all as much as we do.  

Ten days or less...

It's all about the food

Really.

We've all heard

 "you are what you eat,"

 right?  Well, its true.  Our bodies and by extension our lives  are built from the fuel we consume - food, ideas, products, education and on and on.

Because I am always working to be the best I can be, I know I need to put the best into me to feed that end: The best ideas, the best experiences, and yes, the best food.

It would be great if you got to have the best in life as well.

To help us both figure out what that is in this world of increasing complexity, this blog will explore food and all the issues that affect it - from farming practices to recipes, it will show up in the discussion here.

So please check back occasionally to see where this path leads.

opening soon...

The Harvest Grille at 27 Main Street Sterling, MA USA will be opening soon...