100-Mile Chef Doesn't Have Cold Feet (BC 100 mile diet winter restaurant menu)

http://thetyee.ca/Life/2006/11/30/100MileChef/

Nearly a year ago, Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon had given up on restaurants. It was winter, and they were deep into their 100-Mile Diet experiment in local eating. Even local potatoes were sometimes hard to come by at the grocery store; a night on the town sounded impossible. Then they got a call from Raincity Grill and its chef de cuisine, Andrea Carlson. Would they like to come down to try the new 100-mile menu?

"We started it about a year ago, just as they were coming to the end on their diet," Carlson explains. Already known for a strong regional focus, Carlson had simply tightened her focus to ingredients that have travelled less than 100 miles from field to fork. "It distilled the exact nature of what is and isn't available," she says. "We have so, so much here. It's just the salt and the vegetable oil for frying that travel further."

Since then, the tasting menu has become a Raincity fixture that evolves with the seasons. Given that she launched the concept mid-winter, Carlson doesn't shy away with the coming of cold weather. The January main course? Roasted Berkshire pork belly with candied red kuri squash, sunroot -- a.k.a. sunchokes or Jerusalem artichokes -- and arugula.

Happy pigs

A bigger challenge than the weather is building a local supply network outside the industrial food system. Raincity's 100-mile menu is a year-round relationship with farmers. "It's a commitment from us before they start their growing season that we will purchase their products," Carlson says. Raincity also usually works with small-scale operations because "they're the ones that are open to trying to grow different things that are of a higher market value for them."

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and who sell open pollenated heirloom plants. In the last couple of years they have made arrangements with local chefs to start various herbs, hard to find plants, etc. They sell the plants to the chefs, who then use the produce in their cusine.

One day -- not too far away -- this sort of thinking is what will make the difference between 10,000 and 100,000 dead...