Restaurants showcase ‘slow food’ - Central Florida Future

Restaurants showcase ‘slow food’ - Central Florida Future

By showcasing local ingredients this week, 27 area restaurants are encouraging people to slow down, reconnect and enjoy a meal.

Slow Food Orlando partnered with restaurants and farmers to organize Central Florida’s first Eat Local Week.

Slow Food is an international movement that “links the pleasure of food with a commitment to community and the environment,” according to Slow Food USA’s Web site.

Each participating restaurant prepared a three-course menu that highlights three locally grown ingredients, with each ingredient from a different farm, according to Alexia Gawlak,

Slow Food Orlando’s vice president of restaurant relations.

“It’s really about taking the time to enjoy your food and reconnecting around the dinner table with your family and friends,” said Rebecca Reis-Miller, a UCF alumna who started the Slow Food Orlando chapter three years ago.

Trisha Strawn is the co-leader and farmer relations chair of Slow Food Orlando and the livestock manager of Deep Creek Ranch, a local, family owned and operated livestock company.

“My goal is to feed Florida from Florida,” Strawn said. “And I always tell people, we’re changing it one bite at a time.”

Another goal of Slow Food is to educate people about supporting their local economies.

“If you buy local, you support the farmers and their families directly and cut out the middleman,” Gawlak said.

The members of Slow Food are working on making it easier to cut out that middleman.

“One of the things we wanted to do was pair the farmers with restaurants and kind of get everyone talking and facilitate that process,” Gawlak said.

Julie Norris, co-proprietor and general manager of Dandelion Communitea Cafe near downtown Orlando, said that the local farmers were not only chosen for their proximity.

Their independence from the mass markets allows them the freedom to emphasize quality.
“It’s so important to know your grower,” Norris said.

She said with the overuse of pesticides, environmental impact of big agriculture and the poor treatment of farmworkers, the best way to know that the food is good, clean and fair is to build a relationship.

“I’m all about organic food,” Norris said, “but when it comes to a small grower, they can’t get that certification because it’s expensive. But if I know the person and I know what their growing philosophy is, I call that relationship organic. The reason we have a USDA label is because we’ve lost our connection to who’s growing our food.”

Local food can be more expensive, so Eat Local Week is promoting local farmers and the restaurants that purchase from them, Strawn said.

“We want to get the restaurants recognized because it’s a lot of hard work,” he continuted. “It costs them more, which is kind of sad.”

Strawn said a much higher percentage of the money actually makes it to the farmers when the customers buy directly from them.

“If I have to sell to a distributor, it cuts me in half,” Strawn said. “I can’t survive. We won’t make it because we can’t break even doing that.”

Jackie Moore, who owns Austin’s Coffee in Winter Park with her husband, said she doesn’t mind the cost.

“I don’t see how you could go wrong,” she said. “You pay a tiny bit more, but what you get back is tenfold.”

Many of the restaurant owners who are participating in Eat Local Week already purchased local produce.

“When people started talking about this, it was like, ‘Oh there’s a name for the way I live my life,’” Moore said.

Hari Pulapaka, executive chef and owner of Cress Restaurant in DeLand, also purchases locally.

“We have been using local ingredients from the beginning,” Pulapaka said. “If it’s growing locally, then it’s in season. And when you pick produce in season, as long as it’s well taken care of, then you have the best chance for the best flavor.”

When you taste local food you can just feel that somebody gives a care, Moore said.
“I believe that there’s a little more love and care that goes into each item when you can trace back to where it came from,” Moore said. “You know the people aren’t just some corporate machine that don’t care.”