The Locavore's Dilemma

For a long time now I've been speaking and writing articles in favor of being a locavore—of eating foods produced locally. It's simple common sense that there's no reason for people in Pennsylvania to eat a carrot that was put on a truck in Florida and driven a thousand miles north when a locally grown carrot is fresher and just as unsatisfying. (Ha ha just kidding I happen to love carrots.)

So yesterday I decided that maybe for once I'd actually practice what I've been so loudly preaching and have dinner with foods bought only from the local farmer's market. I would walk up there, and the only fossil energy involved would be my own, since I'm rapidly becoming a fossil myself. So anyway, up I go, and after some judicious browsing I bought a quart of string beans.

Against the string beans I can say no word. They were fresh, tasty, good. But the main course was a problem. The only meat you can buy at the farmer's market is sold by these Amish people, and I had a problem with it before. They sell you a chicken leg and thigh for four bucks, and as you can see the birds they use seem to be especially bred for smallness.

They sell a lot of it, though; they have this huge broiler deal, black and smoky, that's going all afternoon, just full of tons of birds, like an avian Auschwitz.* And people lined up to get it; maybe my fellow shoppers were are all avid locavores themselves and approve of the idea of small chickens, since you can transport more of them with every gallon of gas. At any rate, if I wanted a main course that had expired and gone to meet its maker, which I did, this was the only option. And yes, the beans were fine. But the chicken, in addition to small, had been cooked to the precise degree of underdoneness I remembered from last time. The tendons and ligaments kept trying to hold back a portion of the meat, like tax collectors, and the skin was unappealingly flabby. I began to understand why there was never a blooming of Amish restaurants in the trendier city neighborhoods during the '80s. But in addition to undercooked chicken, they sell ones that are either uncooked or cooked to what the Amish consider rare, and I'll try those next. I suppose that it's the same old thing—if you want something done right, including its degree of doneness, you have to do it yourself.



* And don't get your knickers in a twist—I'm a member of the tribe, and I'm allowed to make such jokes. And after all, there's a precedent: Zero Mostel is famous for having remarked of Rumanian-Jewish food that "It's killed more Jews than Hitler."