John Shields, chef-owner of Gertrude's restaurant at the Baltimore Museum of Art, can get his hands on "gorgeous" lettuce grown hydroponically in Waynesboro, Pa., only because David Smith, a northern Baltimore County farmer who takes his own natural beef and free-range eggs to the restaurant, delivers the lettuce for a small cut.
"You have to start to develop your own unique distribution system and delivery system," said Shields. Back when he was a chef in Berkeley, Calif., Shields used to drive 60 miles round trip to get quail from a Petaluma farmer. For Gertrude's, he buys directly from 30 to 40 farmers, keeping track of the orders himself.
"You have to be much more adventurous and committed to do these local products," he said. "You gotta want it."
Buying local food never used to be such a challenge. Shields, who grew up in Baltimore in the 1950s and '60s, recalls a bounty of Eastern Shore produce at the city's municipal markets and on barges in the harbor.
"There was a local food economy and there was a local food-distribution system," he said. All that was dismantled with the advent of Big Agriculture, he said. "It dried up."
In an era when restaurant menus brag about the provenance of nearly every ingredient, Shields has good reason to seek out local food. Private consumers have their own motives.
They mostly want local foods they can't find in traditional supermarkets or can't afford at specialty retailers, but not always. That Alaskan fish appeals to Reitzig and others because fisherman Gaylord Clark - who also sells free-range eggs he raises at Carriage House Farms in Stevenson - catches it in an environmentally sustainable way. A Catonsville co-op orders foreign produce through a Jessup wholesaler, but the members, concerned about pesticides, want it because it's organic.
Even the local farmers who benefit from these intrepid good-food seekers think they're going to an awful lot of trouble.
"We're talking about a customer who's willing to travel, who's willing to try and find a farm, and willing to check out the product, and then they have to be willing to send in a deposit to hold the product," said Nick Maravell of Nick's Organic Farm, which raises grass-fed beef and free-range chickens and turkeys in Potomac and Adamstown.
