Madisonians looking to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to local food can begin by attending a free festival devoted to the subject this weekend.
Starting with a Friday night forum and going into Saturday afternoon, the Food for Thought festival, hosted by the Research, Education, Action and Policy on Food Group, aims to educate and entertain festival-goers about the environmental, economic and food safety benefits of eating locally.
It is more expensive to buy local, and I venture to guess that it always will be,"" said Rachel Armstrong of REAP and Buy Fresh, Buy Local of Southern Wisconsin. ""When you're raising 10,000 cattle, there's no way that a small farmer can match those prices, but I think what we're saying is that those prices are the problem, not local prices '¦ they actually capture the full cost of the product. Nobody's paying for the environmental effects of the 1,000-cattle meat yard. No one's paying for the environmental effects of irrigation in California.""
The Food for Thought forum will bring media members, farmers and restaurateurs alike from Dane County and across the country to Room 125 of Agricultural Hall at 7:30 p.m. to talk about local food issues. The keynote speaker is Dan Barber, chef and co-owner of the Blue Hill restaurant in New York City and an award-winning food writer who has been featured in the New York Times.
Saturday, festival-goers can also learn from the 60 exhibitors that will invade Martin Luther King Jr. from 8:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Armstrong of REAP said students and other festival attendees can enjoy free samples at many exhibitors' booths while they learn about ways to make eating locally easier.
""Coming to the festival will expose them to the variety of places to eat local food, and how to prepare it because a lot of people just aren't that accustomed to raw produce,"" she said. ""It can be a little intimidating, especially for students who are just getting their feet under them in terms of preparing their own food on a regular basis and making choices about what they want to eat.""
Festival-goers can have a bit of fun with their education, too: one of the events on Saturday morning includes a Cooking with the Stars competition at 11 a.m. that pairs local celebrities with chefs to compete in a cooking competition.
The couples will have 30 minutes to shop for supplies at the Farmers' Market, then an hour to prepare a meal using what they bought. Armstrong said the competition is a cross between Dancing with the Stars and Iron Chef - the celebrities must learn from the chefs and do all the cooking legwork themselves.
Celebrity-chef pairs include Mayor Dave Cieslewicz with Barbara Wright of the Dardanelles, Alice in Dairyland with Huma Siddiqui of White Jasmine, WPR radio host Jean Ferraca with Joel Chesebro of Sub-Zero/Wolf Kitchens and Catfish Stephenson with Joey Dunscombe of The Weary Traveler.
Many of the restaurants at the Food for Thought Festival will also be participating in another food event being held Sept. 27, Armstrong said. Eighteen restaurants as diverse as Ian's Pizza and The Old Fashioned to Harvest and L'Etoile will have special menus for Local Night Out, being held by Buy Fresh, Buy Local to promote restaurants that serve local food. Most of the restaurants have sat down with Armstrong to discuss ways to increase their use of local food in the long term as well as for the event.
""They understand that buying locally puts more money into the local economy,"" she said. ""We work with locally owned businesses, and so they already know what a challenge it is to compete against corporate chains, and they want to behave in the same way by giving their business to locally owned, smaller businesses.""
Ian's Pizza is a recent addition to the list of restaurants that have been working with Armstrong, and she said the restaurant's efforts are proof that eating local can also be affordable and easy.
""They have a college market, and that's not normally what you think of,"" she said. ""You think L'Etoile, you think white linens and stuff like that, but local food is accessible to everybody, and that's really important to me, that people realize that and other people take advantage of this great offering.""
For more information on the Food for Thought Festival and Local Night Out, visit REAP's website at http://www.reapfoodgroup.org/.
