I've always been a generalist, someone who knew a little bit about a lot of things, a classic liberal arts major. But one day a few years ago, I took stock and realized the one thing I actually knew quite a lot about was food. I had learned to love eating well from my family. Pop-pop, my grandfather, was a chef at one of Washington's fancy steakhouses. So in addition to all the good flavor and soul of both my grandmothers' southern cooking, we often enjoyed more "upscale" roasts and incredible pineapple cheesecakes that my grandfather knew how to make from scratch. As an adult, I spent many years living outside the DC area, in Mexico, Turkey, and in Texas, which I always said was as close to a foreign country as you could get without leaving the U.S. I became a naturalized Texan by marrying one, then birthing a couple of little Texans.
Through it all, food was what defined good times: in Mexico City, it was pork tacos al pastor carved off the trompo and eaten off greasy squares of paper that you counted up at the end to figure out how many pesos you owed and orange juice squeezed while you watched by the man on the corner with the huge one-armed orange reamer; in Istanbul, it was mussels skewered and fried and munched with oil dribbling down your chin while strolling along the banks of the Bosphorus, or the simple grilled cheese sandwich called töst to accompany steaming tea in slim-waisted glasses in a shady tea garden; in Houston, it was slow-smoked beef barbecue with sweet and sour cucumber salald on the side, and tender kolaches, the pastry adopted from the state's Czech settlers to rival breakfast tacos as the most popular thing to bring to an office in the morning.
I ate more or less whatever came across my path, including polite tastes of both menudo and iskembe, the Mexican and Turkish variants on tripe soup. However, I knew next to nothing about where the food I was eating really came from. The first inkling I had that I was missing something came during language training before I left for Turkey. We were learning the names of fruits and vegetables, and my Turkish language teacher asked us to make a shopping list for the market. Now besides being young and more experienced at buying beer than buying groceries, I was also a show-off, and gave an answer that included an impressive array of produce vocabulary. The teacher read my list and started laughing out loud, with a look of disbelief on her face. “You cannot make this list!” she announced dramatically to the class. “It is impossible!” As I sat there feeling clueless and somehow scapegoated, she added, “Peaches, oranges, apples, cherries, and strawberries – these things do not grow in the same season!”
Still, it wasn't until 2002, when I had returned to suburban Maryland with my husband and two kids, that I began to think about what it was that made food taste good and what the differences were between the foods I had eaten around the world. Here I found that farmers' markets were everywhere, reminding me of the produce market and the fish market and the flower market in Istanbul. I met people like Todd and Ellen Gray at Equinox who were promoting the virtues of food from local farmers in a fine dining setting. And I got to know parents like Kristi, who were way ahead of me in knowing what was in the food their kids were eating. Over the course of a couple of years, I became a convert to the idea of eating locally as much as possible.
For me, eating locally presents a challenge as exciting and as rewarding as any type of gourmet cooking. While I enjoy coming up with dishes that really reflect our local flavors, like maple pecan pie, using local ingredients doesn't limit us to eating "American" food. One of the best dishes I made during a month-long experiment of sourcing all of our food from a 150-mile radius was Greek mousakka, following the method taught to me by my father-in-law, Louis Catacalos, before he died. Every single ingredient save the nutmeg in the bechamel-cheese topping was local and it was fabulous. Food is obviously an integral part of every family's life, but I like that procuring food and knowing where it comes from as well as eating it is part of the process for all of us.