Eating locally: Possible when eating ethnic food?

The photo above is of a fantastic harissa that I had at lunch today at a Tunisian restaurant near my house called Cafe Zitouna.  Harissa is a hot red pepper paste that's made with chili peppers, garlic and spices.  And this is the best harissa that I've ever tasted.  That, combined with a lamb stew couscous today, made for a fantastic lunch.

Was it made from local ingredients?

Not a chance.

The closest I got with local eating at this meal was that I was supporting a local, small business -- something that I believe is a core principle to eating local.

When it comes to eating locally-sourced ingredients when at restaurants, I really fall down on the job.  If the restaurant serves Californian cuisine, or meat and potatoes-type dishes, you can be sure that I'm tracking down restaurants that source their food locally:  Range, Delfina, A16, Zuni Cafe, etc. 

But I've always had issue with ethnic food.

Long before I was a local food advocate, I was completely obsessed with food and flavors and dishes from other countries.  And while I do a great job of sourcing local food when I am cooking at home, I have a need for, and an obsession with, the strong flavors of ethnic food.  It's not an option for me to cut these out of my life.

As was obvious when I posted "a stellar 10 days of food," many of the foods that I love in this city are neither locally-sourced nor sustainable.  This was pointed out by Aaron in the comments when he asked "How do you reconcile eating locally and sustainably with your love of ethnic food and eateries?"

Here's the honest truth:  I don't think that the SOLE food movement has gone deep enough to truly penetrate the ethnic eateries in California.  There are very few authentic ethnic restaurants that are paying attention to SOLE food. 

Progress is being made in this area.  Thimmakka is a non-profit organization that is working to certify environmentally-conscious Asian restaurants in the Bay Area.  But it's a tough row to hoe -- many ethnic restaurants in California are run by immigrants who are already overwhelmed by what it takes to run a restaurant.  In the meantime, what do those of us who want truly authentic ethnic food do when we prefer locally-sourced?

I don't know the answer, and would love to hear any solutions you've come up with for your own life.

As I see it, my options for my lifestyle include:

1) Reconciling that it's fine to do this because I am supporting locally-owned small businesses.  And I am often supporting immigrant communities which are a crucial part of our society.

2) Only eating vegetarian at ethnic eateries (or pescaterian more likely).  This option makes my heart hurt a bit, but maybe it's what I need to do.

Are there other options?  How do you deal with it?  As someone who cares deeply about supporting local food economies, how should I best reconcile this for myself?

Comments

[Anita]

So far, my choice has been moderation, the 80-20 rule, etc.

We eat 90%-local and 99%-ethical/sustainable at home, and I've gone pescaterian when I buy lunch at the office. So I figure that the occasional taqueria carnitas or cheap-chinese dry-fried chicken is a lot better than the alternative. Even a year ago, this was barely on my radar...

[Amanda]

80 to 90% of our food at home is SOLE, and we rarely go out anymore. But when we are out or when the kids are at school I losen my standards/expectations. We have this conversation a lot in the student forum at Bauman College (culinary arts and holistic nutrition school) and this is the basic opinion of most of the faculty/students. If your foundation is strong, then don't beat yourself up about the rest. It's not a 100% or nothing. I really like what you say about supporting a local business, even if it's not necessarily local food. You have to be practical in order for this movement to be mainstream.

[cookiecrumb]

I'm going to challenge your "supporting locally owned small businesses" argument. Does your local mom & pop shop (often immigrants) carry sustainable, local ingredients? Probably not, and you probably don't shop there for pantry staples...
As for restaurants, I can't blame you one iota for wanting the flavors you love; I do it too. But I haven't been able to invent an ethical excuse for it. I just want to eat that way sometimes.
I get Anita's percentage-based approach. Let's just be easy (but honest and realistic) on ourselves; we do a good job.
xxoo

[melanie]

Free-range chickens (served whole on the bone, not the frozen breast meat used in cheap stir-fries) at Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants are mainly sourced from Sonoma County and Calif.'s Central Valley (i.e., Stockton, Modesto). Reichardt Duck Farm in Petaluma (http://www.reichardtduckfarm.com/) has a near monopoly on supplying ducks to our Chinatowns. Squab comes from the Central Valley too. So I think we can feel comfortable with the "local" part eating poultry at these restaurants. Remember Rocky the Ranger's grandfather was a Chinese chicken. Let's work on learning more about the husbandry practices.

Since Cafe Zitouna serves halal lamb, I bet it came from a local producer in California if it was fresh meat. So, you may well have been enjoying a local product.

[Seattlejo]

Do you read Tigers and Strawberries?
http://www.tigersandstrawberries.com/

I think you might find her interesting based on her experience with local food and her cooking at an ethnic restaruant.

[McAuliflower]

I see support of local foods as supportive of most ethnic foods in that they are Regionally Relevant.

Buy immigrant food from immigrants. If you can't find immigrant run restaurants, strive for authenticity in the foods preparation?

And as I write this I wonder on the role of Fusion cooking in the local food ethos- when the heart of the preparation is often taking a non-local ingredient and treating it locally. I think your practice of eating vegetarian hits on the reverse of that- its a personal protest* when local ingredients could be prepped with non-local treatments.

Our support of local food has a love of regionality and specialization at heart, one that can easily fit ethnic foods in there too.

great questions in this post- where do we draw the line and why? What happens when our line gets fudged?

*how about following up the restaurant visit with an old fashioned paper note stating your reasons for avoiding certain dishes at their restaurant? This could work well as a post card habit too.

[richelle]

I'm on the same page--while local eating is important to me, I just don't feel ready to give up coconut milk for the rest of my life.

I like your idea of sticking to menu items that are more likely made with local ingredients. Virtually all the vegetables used in ethnic cooking are grown somewhere here in Washington state, especially since a number of farms here are owned and operated by Asian or Latin American families.

I like McA's idea of a note. I would be more apt to simply ask what is local and what is not. This would communicate that their customers care about where their food comes from. Certain items will obviously never be local, but the meat, fish, and veggies--even the brown rice--might be.

The business model for many ethnic restaurants surely relies on the premise that they are often less expensive than most other eateries, which in turn means they also must choose less expensive options for overhead. In order for them to be successful selling sustainably produced food, they would need to market it as such to an audience willing to pay a little more. But first, we need to let them know that we want it.

Thanks for the post - I will consider breaching this topic with the waitress next time I go out!

[patrick]

we've changed our dining-out habits based more on the meat issue than the local issue. I am glad I ate at so many taco trucks when I did (and pho shops, and Burma Superstar, and so on) because even though it was hard (at first) to not hit the taqueria or whatever, I just can't do the factory farmed meat any more. So I don't.

What we do is, make ethnic food at home (mostly mexican, which i can do better than most restaurants, though not taqueria-style; and i now can make a very good pho) and patronize the uncommon-but-becoming-more-common ethnic restaurants that use sustainably raised meats and, on occasion, local produce. The bonus is that around here, sustainable meat means regionally sourced meat, more often than not. And we're lucky in Portland to have places like Por Que No (a decent taqueria substitute) and Pok Pok (thai) and Screen Door (Southern cooking, oh lordy, too good) and Biwa (Izakaya and handmade noodles). More and more of these places keep showing up, and maybe someday one of them will serve excellent pho bo. Till then I'll make my own.

I guess the most relevant thing we do, though, is we don't go out very much.

[patrick]

Also to McAuliflower's point about the note-- This works, sometimes. The first time I visited Pok Pok (when it was just a stand) I inquired after the chicken. Andy told me that he couldn't afford to pay the premium for naturally raised birds. So I ordered vegetarian (and was underwhelmed). The next time we visited, which was almost a year later, all the meat on the menu was naturally raised and regionally sourced. I know I wasn't the only one to ask about where the chicken came from. But it's good to know that it matters.

[Tea]

All I can say is that I was delighted when my local SF taqueria (L'Avenida in the Sunset) started using Niman Ranch! Of course I don't know where their chickens come from...

These days I definitely eat more vege in restaurants I'm unsure of. And I find comfort in the percentages as well. I like the idea of leaving a note, I might try that. Letting business owners know that there are people who care is probably the first step.

[Amanda]

I totally agree w/ Patrick, "I guess the most relevant thing we do, though, is we don't go out very much."

Botton line is, we need to be eating/cooking all/most of our meals at home. By eating at home, you have total control over food quality as well as health/wellness issues.

If your foundation is strong then does it really matter when you pick up the crappy (but tasty) taco at the local joint? I don't think so.

[Avery Yale Kamila]

I totally agree with you that eating at locally owned restaurants is just as important as eating locally grown food. I feel that by supporting both local farmers and local restaurant owners we can help make both stronger. And as our local farms and food systems become more robust, they'll be able to supply more food to more restaurants (and not just the white tablecloth eateries).

[Jimi]

Patrick and Tea, Is cooking solely at home really the solution?

What is better 105,000,000 ovens firing at dinner time, or restaurants serving masses of people.

While I find it interesting to speculate, the restaurant kitchen seams to be the more progressive approach.

[Robin]

These are great questions about the boundaries and limitations of eating locally. In these instances, I think of prepared food in terms of how personal it is.

When I worked in a retail cheese shop in Manhattan, a woman would come to the kitchen door twice a week, selling tamales with her young kids in tow. The tamales she served out of a cooler were lovely, hand made, delicious, and by buying them, I got an amazing lunch for $2 and had a warm exchange with the cook and her kids.

Was the chicken in her tamales pasture raised? Of course not. But the food and the exchange were intensely personal, and I can't feel bad about that.

[patrick]

jimi, you raise an interesting point. if there were shared or community kitchens in popular use, we could save a lot of cooking-heat energy and have a good time besides. In fact, in my neighborhood there is a community food group of about 15 people who share a meal twice a week, rotating from one members' kitchen to the next.

But restaurants are incredibly wasteful when it comes to food. They purchase more than they use, throw away large amounts of "un-servable" leftovers or uneaten/uncooked food, and never mind the amount of paper and plastic disposable material that gets thrown away as a result of take-out and cheap-restaurant purchases. At home, we eat nearly everything that we purchase, compost the rest, and we hand out no takeout containers, paper towels, or other disposables to anyone.

The fuel usage is perhaps proportionally higher on an individual (or family) level, but for reasons financial, ethical, and conservational, eating at home is by far the better option. (I'm curious about the fuel use, too... will have to think about that some more.)

That's a really interesting point, though, and one that I will think about going forward.

[VI]

I've blogged a bit about this as well:
http://vitalinformation.blogspot.com/2008/03/whats-not-local.html

It does not bother me to eat ethnic/non-local food, but it would make me happier if I could find more local in my local.

I was in Wisconsin a few weeks ago. Unlike the farms closer to Chicago, it is easier for "start-up" farms. Hence at the markets you see more Mexican and Asian farmers, especially Hmong. It translates into some interesting produce. Unfortunatley, it does not translate so much in the local restaurants.

[MPG]

I have debated the same issue while buying mostly local, I also want to enjoy my traditional & other ethnic foods! I just had harissa at a local african restaurant...m going to try to make it next! Btw, I love your blog and am adding it to my list of power links now!

[p]

This is a question I've struggled with, too, and I've come to the same conclusions as many of the other commenters here: I try to avoid eating feedlot meat, so if I do go to a restaurant that is doesn't clarify where they get their meat, I order something vegetarian. I am trying to learn how to make the foods I love (like carnitas) at home using better quality ingredients. And I cook at home most nights, and I eat less ethnic food than I used to.

[Sophie]

A really interesting post. I've been thinking about just this problem a lot recently as I have been working in an area of London that has a huge selection of ethnic food shops. It is fascinating to see the fruits and vegetables that are available that you just can't get in a normal food store. I started off thinking how great it was that people had such ready access to these ingredients (which they obviously make a lot of use of), but it started to trouble me after a while when I realised the massive amount of importing that was going on (and from the other side of the world, literally).

I have a work committment coming up where I need to cook traditional dishes from this community but with a healthy twist and I'm in two minds of what to do. At the moment I'm thinking about cooking vegetarian, just to offset some of the damage and to get people thinking.

[Jean Johnson]

When I make the food I ate in Bangkok here in my Portland, Oregon home, I do what a Thai would do and happily substitute what's local, fresh, and affordable. Besides, it's not so much the green papaya as it is what happens in the mortar and pestle to balance sweet, salt, spicy, and sour.

Jean Johnson
www.measurefreerecipes.com
Forthcoming cookbook: Cooking Beyond Measure--How to Eat Well without Formal Recipes.