Bon Appetit handles food services at Goucher College in Towson and St. Mary's College in Southern Maryland. In the Washington region, it has contracts with, among others, the University of Maryland's advanced education program at Shady Grove, American University, Georgetown Law School and Gallaudet University.
Norm Zwagil is the general manager of Bon Appetit operations at Goucher. He's excited about his work and the company that employs him. He has been at Goucher for eight years and seems to know every farmer who grows for the markets, and even the ones who don't.
"The atmosphere is hot right now," Zwagil said the other night, and he wasn't speaking of Baltimore's July weather. He was talking about the buy-local movement. This is not some quaint, touchy-feely, bred-in-California trend. It's not about aesthetics. It's about something practical - the cost of producing and transporting food, a rejection of what globalization and industrial agriculture has given us.
More and more consumers get this. The farmers are starting to get it, too. "In some ways, it's easier to locate and purchase food from them now," Zwagil said.
He can list the farmers that feed Goucher - black Angus burgers and top round from Roseda Beef in Monkton; produce from One Straw Farm in White Hall, said to be Maryland's largest organic vegetable farm; shrimp from Marvesta farms in Hurlock on the Eastern Shore; and more produce from a robust growers' cooperative in Tuscarora, Pa.. The eggs that Goucher students eat come from cage-free chickens from various sources in the region. There's never a problem, Zwagil said, getting local cheese and other dairy products, chicken, beef and bread.
He's a big fan of One Straw, run by Joan and Drew Norman. "Last year, Zwagil said, "they had a bumper crop of tomatoes. They were able to find a cannery in southern Pennsylvania and we ... ended up with a great marinara sauce."
When he started pulling resources together for Goucher's dining hall, Zwagil hit the farmers' markets. That's where he met a lot of the growers who supply the campus kitchen with 20 to 25 percent of its food. Some products come off the local farms all year, some only seasonally, starting in spring with loads of greens and continuing into early December with hard squashes and storage apples.
Yesterday, Mike Tabor of Licking Creek Bend Farms in Needmore, Pa., was on his way to Goucher with bushels of fresh peaches and cantaloupes. Bon Appetit is making 700 box lunches for a Black & Decker event tomorrow, and everyone will get a peach.
When a Sun reporter visited Goucher's dining hall two years ago, the menu included baked chicken from Springfield Farm in Sparks, stuffed with chestnuts from a tree in Baltimore County. The apple crisp was made with fruit from Eden Valley Farm. The sauteed kale and roasted potatoes came from Help From Above Farm. The green beans and red bell peppers came from New Morning Farm. Those last three farms are in Pennsylvania.
More Maryland farms should get in on this. And more institutions.
And more restaurants. And more consumers. It's nice that the governor has declared this "buy local week" in Maryland, but he should do a lot more. It should be buy local forever. Think globally - act, buy, eat locally.
dan.rodricks@baltsun.com
Dan Rodricks can be heard on "Midday," Mondays through Thursdays, noon to 2 p.m., on 88.1 WYPR-FM.
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