Mouthing Off

During the election season, our food-obsessed features intern, Kaitlyn Goalen, became a hard-core political-news junkie; now, in its wake, she has been getting her fix by following the Obama transition. Here, she shares why the rest of the food world should also be watching:

Inauguration day is drawing near (41 days to go!), and as a foodie, I’m anxious about the Secretary of Agriculture pick. Apparently, I’m not the only one. Michael Pollan, Rick Bayless, Dan Barber and 80 other food activists signed a letter to the new President offering up nominations for the position. Alice Waters, who also signed the letter, has gone so far as to offer her personal services in the creation of a White House organic garden.

The timing is particularly crucial: As the economy continues to stumble, the challenge for small, local and sustainable producers to survive is bigger than ever. The demand for organic food has slowed considerably in the last two months due to its traditionally higher prices than conventionally grown food. If change is really the backbone of Obama's presidency, then it’s time we see a farmer, a chef or a true food activist in office.

A few weeks ago, a friend convinced me to go on a midweek dining adventure to Plainview, New York, where a classic steak house had recently undergone a “philosophical” menu makeover. I was a bit skeptical when I heard the words “vegan tasting menu” and “steak house” in the same sentence, and even more apprehensive when we got off exit 48 on the Long Island Expressway and pulled up in front of Race Palace, western Nassau County's 47,000-square-foot off-track betting behemoth. Below the gambling dens, on the ground floor, is Maxwell and Dunne’s, a 200-seat, Art Deco dining room with a Sopranos vibe that attracted a loyal local crowd for years with its Kansas City strips and rib eyes.

Why would a successful steak house go vegan? The executive chef, Chris Palmer—a large man with a mohawk—looks like he could be a Hell’s Angel, not an organic-food evangelist. He’d been running the restaurant back in 2004, when it got a very good review from the New York Times. But earlier this year, when he noticed that one of his sons was having trouble paying attention in school, he decided to try an experiment. He put his family on an all-organic, all-natural diet. Taking away the processed food and sugary sweets worked, and thus began Palmer’s mission to reinvent his restaurant with an organic, sustainable menu makeover.

For the first few weeks, the place was empty—red-quinoa summer rolls and watermelon-ginger mojitos made with agave nectar scared off his regular meat-and-potatoes customers. But now, a new crowd has caught on. Carnivores can still get a great filet mignon or dry-aged porterhouse—all the beef comes from Meyer Natural Angus in Montana and is hormone-, steroid- and antibiotic-free, as well as certified humane. There is a supercreative menu of vegetarian sides. I loved the Kung Pao carrots, which are lightly fried in a house-made ginger-ale tempura. Most of the produce is sourced from local purveyors, including Satur Farms  (black-and-white photos of the farm hang on the walls in the bar). And there’s even a four-course vegan tasting menu. What seems like a no-brainer concept to a Manhattanite feels more forward-thinking in the ’burbs, and chef Palmer is trying to educate the community by talking about organic food in local elementary schools. This January, he's going to start taking groups on shopping tours at the local Whole Foods, followed by healthy cooking classes at the Maxwell and Dunne's kitchen.

Our December gift guide  only had room for 40 items. Here are three more, from a steal to a splurge, that I'd almost love to receive more than give.

$5 and up
Me & Goji Cereals
This brilliant new service from a New Hampshire–based company allows you to custom-design your own breakfast cereal—or your friends'. Drag and drop your favorite flakes, nuts and dried fruits into the website bowl, name your mix and send it off in a 100% post-consumer-recycled-material cylinder to your favorite cereal junkie.

$25 and up
Colson Patisserie Financiers
Financiers: also known as God's Perfect Cookies. My favorite Brooklyn bakery, Colson Patisserie, just launched an online store. Their pistachio financiers are moist and fragrant, adorably small and hopelessly addictive. A tin of 30 should be just enough for one.

$100 and up
Roseda Beef Boxes
Roseda raises Angus cattle just north of Baltimore, MD, and ships its corn-finished, dry-aged natural beef nationwide. Themed packages include "Keeping It Lean," ($97 for seven of the most low-fat portions, like Tri-Tip and Culotte Steaks), or the higher-rolling "No Bones About It" ($187 for 10 boneless cuts like, Filet Mignon and Delmonico steaks, plus four of Roseda's amazing dry-aged steak burgers). Definitely share with friends.

Our August issue, out now, includes a fun guide to local flavors with delicious in-season recipes  from 15 locavore chefs. We tapped all 15 for their favorite local ingredients and had trouble whittling their generous suggestions down to a mere 45 . To round the list out to an even 50, here are five more, traveling across the U.S. from east to west:

1. Nesenkeag Farm
Tony Maws of Craigie Street Bistrot in Cambridge, MA, gets fresh cranberry beans from this charitable, nonprofit organic farm in New Hampshire; it also hosts an annual on-farm poetry reading.

2. Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket
Everyone knows about Manhattan’s Union Square Greenmarket, but all the cool people (like chef Andrew Feinberg of Franny’s) go to this Brooklyn location on Saturdays for its Ronnybrook Farm Dairy milk and Blue Moon trout.

3. The Velvet Tango Room
Douglas Katz of Cleveland’s Fire Food & Drink gives the nod to Paulius Nasvytis and Orva Fuston’s bar for its fantastic “local” cocktails with house-made bitters and vermouths.

4. Jolie Vue Farms
At this Houston-area farm, lawyer-rancher Glen Boudreaux feeds his free-roaming Berkshire and Duroc pigs pecans, making them “some of the tastiest pigs you’ll ever eat,” says Monica Pope of Houston’s t’afia.

5. Lagunitas IPA
Joseph Humphrey of Cavallo Point’s Murray Circle in Sausalito, CA, gets right to the point: “Nothing beats a Lagunitas IPA with cold oysters!” Amen.

I recently met up with chef Daniel Snukal from the restaurant 3 on Fourth in Santa Monica for a short chat on sustainability. The next time I looked at my watch, it was an hour-and-a-half later. The reason: Snukal's fascinating (and sometimes contrarian) take on the subject. My crib notes:

On locavorism: "Locavorism is an old-fashioned idea and doesn’t work for the way we live now. You can’t look at things as absolutes. I really get the idea of locavorism, but it’s really impractical. For a farm to deliver to 80 restaurants in Los Angeles is a lot of work and fuel and driving if they don’t have a central distribution area. With the way infrastructure is in some places, delivering produce locally might use more fuel overall than having items shipped via FedEx, since the FedEx plane would be carrying a lot of other items as well."

On seafood: Snukal is working with a farm in Trang, Thailand, to exclusively import naturally farmed (meaning no antibiotics or hormones) soft-shell crabs from a river sanctuary that’s protected by the government. He serves the crab at his restaurant and is selling it to other restaurants in California, including Sushi Roku. Snukal also likes ecologically farmed Loch Duart salmon from Cleanfish.

On beef: "Most grass-fed beef in the U.S. is just finished with grass for the cattle's last 60 days," says Snukal. Instead of domestic beef, he buys Uruguayan Estancia Beef, raised entirely on grass. (The company claims that the amount of fuel used to transport their beef to the U.S. is far less than the amount required to fatten the average U.S. feedlot steer.)

On chicken: Snukal likes a number of different chickens for braising, specifically Niman Ranch’s Poulet Rouge Fermiere, a French heritage variety, for its "tighter" meat. While Niman Ranch is currently only selling the chicken wholesale, expect it to hit stores within the next couple of months.

While the rock stars of the food and wine worlds were hanging out in Aspen last weekend, another group of rockers gathered on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee, for Bonnaroo, a four-day Woodstock-esque music festival that brings together environmentally conscious performers like Pearl Jam and Jack Johnson.This year’s festival set new standards for sustainability. Diane Hatz, founder and director of Sustainable Table, the nonprofit responsible for the Eat Well Guide, blogged daily from the event and called me today to share some green highlights:

* The festival hired a sustainability coordinator to help reduce consumption.

* Bonnaroo’s goal is to buy 75 percent of all food it sells from local sources within three to five years, and festival organizers provided food vendors with a list of local farmers they could work with.

* An organic café was selling fair-trade coffee, organic fruits and vegetables, arepas and jerk chimichangas while vendors hawked organic, vegetarian corn dogs and organic funnel cake (festival-goers could pick up leftover oil from the funnel-cake fryer to fuel their biodiesel cars).

* Organic beer from Vermont brewers Orlio and Stone Mill was on tap.

* Sustainable Table volunteers were barbecuing on a solar-powered oven.

* A Solar Stage hosted bands as well as panel discussions on the state of our planet.

Last night my colleague Emily Kaiser and I gondola'd to the top of Aspen Mountain for a dinner benefiting the Wholesome Wave Foundation, the 2008 recipient of F&W's Grow for Good campaign. We enjoyed a local-minded meal prepared by chefs Roy Yamaguchi, Hung Huyhn (Top Chef's 2007 winner), Ryan Hardy and Michel Nischan, who founded Wholesome Wave last year.

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