Movement to eat locally grown food gains momentum in Wilmington

Her kingdom for a carrot - so long as it's locally grown.

For the past four months, Jessica Probst and her husband, Sal Marsico, have been on a culinary quest - to live on local foods as much as possible.

Gone are such favorites as mangos, avocados and, lately, even carrots. New staples include free-range chicken from Riegelwood, goat cheese from Hampstead and the produce they haul back twice a week from area farmers markets.

"We shake hands with the people we get food from," Marsico said. "How many people can say they know the people from where their food comes from?"

A few more than used to, it seems. Locally produced foods are enjoying a surge of interest thanks in part to recent best sellers like The Omnivore's Dilemma and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which extol community-produced food over the trucked-in fare lining most supermarkets.

In Wilmington, the idea has inspired a pair of Web sites, cricketbread.com, an account of life on food produced, farmed, foraged or scavenged within 100 miles of Wilmington, and wilmingtonlocalliving.com, Probst's blog about her diet and the people she has come to meet through it.

Followers cite varied benefits of eating local, from the reduced use of fuel in transportation to a greater awareness of who raises food and how. For Probst, the overarching reason is to simplify life, a claim she realizes is ironic considering the canning, pickling, freezing and sauce-making that have ensued.

The result, though, has been a rewarding return to basics, relying on what is in season and doing without what is not, she said. Even the most banal food can become exotic depending on the time of year.

"I would do anything to eat a carrot," Probst said, longing for a cool-weather crop still weeks from harvest.

'Locavores' vary

"Locavores," as they've been dubbed, take varied approaches. A writer for New York magazine recently pushed the idea to humorous extremes, subsisting for a month off the "farm" he created in his Brooklyn backyard. Probst and Marsico aim to stay within the Carolinas, which has led them to discover places such as Carolina Plantation Aromatic Rice and Jackson Dairy Farm, which home-delivers ice cream from Dunn.

Trace Ramsey, produce manager at Tidal Creek Cooperative Market and the author of cricketbread.com, draws his line at a 100-mile radius around Wilmington, although he includes non-local food that would otherwise go to waste, such as expired vegetables, bruised fruit and even the occasional item pulled from a Dumpster.

The diet has become something of an adventure. He's discovered an old, abandoned blueberry farm, ventured into saltwater fishing, foraged for walnuts in his neighborhood, and dabbled in the arts of food preservation, like making sauerkraut, a process that took four weeks of fermenting.

He's less concerned about claims that local diets use less energy, which he acknowledges isn't always the case, or about the health benefits since many long-distance foods, like organics, may also be good for you.

For him, buying from local farmers is an investment in the landscape of his community, one where agriculture isn't banished to distant industrialized farms. Sending money directly to farmers bolsters them against development pressures, he said.

Paying a little more for a pound of local kale, in other words, might be one of the most powerful environmental gestures he can make.

Demand for

local food grows

Neither Probst nor Ramsey are militant in their focus. Both like coffee too much to exclude it, although Ramsey did try getting his caffeine fix by making tea from yaupon bushes for a while. And neither would shun a dinner invitation to avoid a California tomato. Still few people go so far as they.

But more people are showing interest in increasing local food in their diet, said Stefan Hartmann, who has been farming for more than 20 years at Black River Organic Farm in Sampson County.

For the past decade, the farm has run a subscription service where people, mostly in Wilmington, pay for a weekly basket of mixed produce.

Last year, the farm had 55 subscribers. This year, it had 87. Next year, it may reach 100, he said. Likewise, demand at farmers markets has surged, he said.

"Those are two real strong indicators that people like to know where their stuff is grown and appreciate that it wasn't shipped halfway around the world before it got to them," he said.

He half-jokingly tells people that the surge of exports from China, and the troubles with toothpaste, toy and pet food poisoning, has made people wary of distant deliveries, doing more for local farmers than any interest group could have been paid to do.

"I think there's a backlash against this whole global economy where stuff comes in from China and nobody knows what has been done to it," he said. "People are hungry for value."

Even supermarkets are showing more interest. Ten years ago, Cal Lewis, of Lewis Nursery and Farm, had to struggle to get his strawberries in local chains, which didn't want to interrupt their nearly year-round supply from California to tap into the six-week season here. Now Wal-Mart, Lowes Foods and Food Lion take his fruit.

"The perception of the public is that it's more flavorful, and it is," he said. "It's harvested closer to ripeness than you can do in California."

Sam Scott: 343-2370

sam.scott@starnewsonline.com