Twice a year, Liz Reitzig drives 2 1/2 hours to a Pennsylvania farm, then heads back home to Bowie with half a cow in the minivan. Closer to home, she regularly meets a farmer in a parking lot to buy whole chickens. Fish comes straight from a Baltimore County guy who casts nets in Alaska and brings the catch back frozen. She picks up eggs at somebody's driveway and produce at the farmers' market.
She hasn't been to a conventional supermarket for years.
"I would say about 80 to 90 percent of our food is coming direct from farmers," said Reitzig, 29, a stay-at-home mother of four. "Pretty much anything we can think of."
Reitzig is among a small but growing number of consumers who prize straight-from-the-small-farm food - and go to great lengths to get it. For them, the farmers' market is but one stop in a complicated, ever-evolving food-distribution system they've sometimes rigged up themselves. Concerned about food safety, worried about the environmental impact of factory farming or simply swept up in locavore chic, they are seeking local and non-industrial foods that they cannot find in supermarkets or afford at specialty retailers like Whole Foods.
Some take turns with neighbors picking up meats at farms hundreds of miles away. Others, finding one another on Web sites like eatwild.com, have banded together in co-ops and "buying clubs" so big that farmers are willing to deliver to them. Martha Holdridge, owner of West Wind Farm in Grassy Meadows, W.Va., drops off her grass-fed beef to customers in the parking lot of an Owings Mills natural foods store, outside an Annapolis wellness center and on the edge of a Columbia cul-de-sac.
Liz Smith of Hamilton has plans to buy a whole steer from an area farmer and split the meat with four friends. Her name for it: "cowpooling."
"You have this strange patchwork of relationships that are happening," said Leo Horrigan, program officer for the Farming for the Future program at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. "It's sort of cloak and dagger. I have a friend who said he was meeting a farmer halfway in a parking lot and it sounded like a drug deal. 'OK, here's the money. Here's the meat.' "
With local food all the rage but local food-distribution systems lacking, even people who procure food for a living find themselves using some of these offbeat channels.
