![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Buy "local"
Sep. 20th, 2007 10:05 amAmongst some foodies, September is "Eat Local" month.* Hey, we're even having a sale on (participating) California Artisan Cheese Guild cheeses. There is great cheese being made in the state of California. The difference between when I started buying cheese and now is just incredible and I'm really happy to be able to sell things so good that people are shocked that they are locally-made.
But what is "local" when you're talking dairy?** The concept of "food miles" is entering the grocery lexicon and like many trendy terms, it's more complicated than it looks at first glance.
For September, I made a list of cheese we sell and how far the dairies are from the store. I used the location of the cheese plant as the distance measure. For non-farmstead cheese,*** this only tells us so much. While some non-farmstead cheese producers, like Vella or Bravo Farms, use only one nearby farm for all their milk, milk is often a pooled product, collected from many different farms before it is brought to the creamery.
For example, the largest goat dairy producer in the state has their cheese made in a plant about two hours away from the city. However, they collect milk from a radius of about 200 miles from the plant. To make things more complex, they don't deal direct so we buy that cheese from a distributor but not always the same distributor (depending on price/sales/availability). The point is that the cheese may be from only two hours away but if you look at it from farm to shelf, it may have racked up 500 miles.
In addition, some cheese makers buy frozen curd from elsewhere, especially goat curd, because the demand for cheese exceeds the production of milk in their local area. They also might do it for price or taste reasons. Laura Chenel is a pioneer of the US goat cheese world and a great California cheese maker. Her goat cheese helped create the local food movement in the Bay Area. She sold her company to a French cheese company a few years back, but even before that the cheese bearing her name used a percentage of frozen French goat curd along with the milk of local goats. Don't take me writing this as me being opposed to this practice. That's why her cheese has such a distinctive taste. But is it really local?
Another thing that is standard industry practice is repacking. This means buying cheese from another company and putting your label on it. Now that people are concerned with local food this seems dishonest, but traditionally in the cheese business this has been done to provide products that otherwise would not be available. Making cheddar is a completely different operation than making fresh chevre, for example. If you can buy some made elsewhere and sell it to people who want it, why not? Nowadays, people finding this out tend to feel betrayed. Old time dairy folks find this confusing.
Confusing this further is when the company repacking has a geography in their name. That "Marin Cheese Company" feta now has a label that says it's made in France but I used to cringe and patiently explain to customers that the "local" feta came from 8000 miles away and was just cut, wrapped, and labeled locally. We even put up a big sign that said that so that we wouldn't be implicated. Of course, many customers refused to believe us and bought the "local" cheese elsewhere.
Remember folks. "Local" has no legal definition. It means about as much as "natural" and "artisan".
*I think 100 miles is a very arbitrary choice, leaving out vast agricultural regions that have the Bay Area as their biggest market. I mean, what are they supposed to do? Build big cities in Ag areas so they'll have someone to sell to?
** Let's leave out rennet and cultures completely since almost no one uses home made versions anymore. Cheesemakers instead buy these ingredients from "culture houses", but they also don't make up much of the end product.
***Farmstead cheese means that cheese is made on the dairy farm using only milk from that farm. You may have idyllic views of what "Farmstead" looks like, but there is no definition for how big that farm can be or the conditions on it. This brings up other issues, but we're not going to discuss those in this entry
But what is "local" when you're talking dairy?** The concept of "food miles" is entering the grocery lexicon and like many trendy terms, it's more complicated than it looks at first glance.
For September, I made a list of cheese we sell and how far the dairies are from the store. I used the location of the cheese plant as the distance measure. For non-farmstead cheese,*** this only tells us so much. While some non-farmstead cheese producers, like Vella or Bravo Farms, use only one nearby farm for all their milk, milk is often a pooled product, collected from many different farms before it is brought to the creamery.
For example, the largest goat dairy producer in the state has their cheese made in a plant about two hours away from the city. However, they collect milk from a radius of about 200 miles from the plant. To make things more complex, they don't deal direct so we buy that cheese from a distributor but not always the same distributor (depending on price/sales/availability). The point is that the cheese may be from only two hours away but if you look at it from farm to shelf, it may have racked up 500 miles.
In addition, some cheese makers buy frozen curd from elsewhere, especially goat curd, because the demand for cheese exceeds the production of milk in their local area. They also might do it for price or taste reasons. Laura Chenel is a pioneer of the US goat cheese world and a great California cheese maker. Her goat cheese helped create the local food movement in the Bay Area. She sold her company to a French cheese company a few years back, but even before that the cheese bearing her name used a percentage of frozen French goat curd along with the milk of local goats. Don't take me writing this as me being opposed to this practice. That's why her cheese has such a distinctive taste. But is it really local?
Another thing that is standard industry practice is repacking. This means buying cheese from another company and putting your label on it. Now that people are concerned with local food this seems dishonest, but traditionally in the cheese business this has been done to provide products that otherwise would not be available. Making cheddar is a completely different operation than making fresh chevre, for example. If you can buy some made elsewhere and sell it to people who want it, why not? Nowadays, people finding this out tend to feel betrayed. Old time dairy folks find this confusing.
Confusing this further is when the company repacking has a geography in their name. That "Marin Cheese Company" feta now has a label that says it's made in France but I used to cringe and patiently explain to customers that the "local" feta came from 8000 miles away and was just cut, wrapped, and labeled locally. We even put up a big sign that said that so that we wouldn't be implicated. Of course, many customers refused to believe us and bought the "local" cheese elsewhere.
Remember folks. "Local" has no legal definition. It means about as much as "natural" and "artisan".
*I think 100 miles is a very arbitrary choice, leaving out vast agricultural regions that have the Bay Area as their biggest market. I mean, what are they supposed to do? Build big cities in Ag areas so they'll have someone to sell to?
** Let's leave out rennet and cultures completely since almost no one uses home made versions anymore. Cheesemakers instead buy these ingredients from "culture houses", but they also don't make up much of the end product.
***Farmstead cheese means that cheese is made on the dairy farm using only milk from that farm. You may have idyllic views of what "Farmstead" looks like, but there is no definition for how big that farm can be or the conditions on it. This brings up other issues, but we're not going to discuss those in this entry
