Eating is more than a biological need. It’s a pleasure. It’s an adventure. Sometimes it’s a comfort. We sit around a table with friends and loved ones and we eat. We put food out and we taste and we talk. We meet friends at cafés. We take first dates to fine restaurants. We celebrate anniversaries the same way. And we mourn the passing of a loved one over a buffet. In my house, we eat one meal while talking about another.

In every way imaginable, human beings have a love affair with food. Culture is most often expressed through language, the arts, and cuisine. Each culture has its own flavors, and we visit that culture every time we taste its food. Good cooking is more than just technique; it’s an expression of our creativity. Who doesn’t want to be thought of as a good cook? Whose most vivid memories of childhood don’t in some respect include food?

Spoken in those terms, our relationship with food is a happy, healthy, and joyous experience. But that isn’t always the case. In many segments of the U.S. population, malnutrition and obesity are health hazards that threaten hundreds of thousands of lives. From the anorexic teenager to the diabetic schoolchild, food has devolved into an unhappy, chaotic obsession. Fresh food has either lost its appeal, become unavailable, or—for a new generation—become a mystery. Fast food is a diet staple for many Americans. But while it’s possible to purchase a cheeseburger, French fries, and a large soda for roughly $2, the actual costs of a fast-food-obsessed nation are unbelievably high. According to the surgeon general, some 300,000 Americans die annually from illnesses caused or worsened by obesity. In fact, according to the surgeon general’s office, obesity may soon overtake tobacco as the chief cause of preventable death. And that doesn’t even begin to address the social, economic, and environmental costs.

So what’s going on?

What’s happening is that we’ve lost our connection to the source of our food. Our fast-paced lifestyles have ignited a processed-food industry—both conventional and organic—eager to satisfy our desire to eat lean, mean, and on the go. Because processing strips food of its nutritional content, certain vitamins and minerals must be artificially replaced. And manufacturers’ promises of improved memories and higher energy levels are equally artificial. Sadly, that same industry would have us believe that fresh foods—fruits and vegetables from small-scale, sustainable, and organic farms—are unnecessary, if not downright dangerous. And even if we don’t believe that, we resign ourselves to the notion that small-scale farms are quaint relics of a bygone era; that they’re not the future of farming; that they’re not going to feed the world.

The facts, however, say otherwise. Small-scale, sustainable, and organic farming is not only feasible; many experts say it is also the only viable form of farming. And it is the only model that offers any hope of sustaining us in the future. Small-scale farms—the same ones that dot the landscape of the Mid-Atlantic from the Chesapeake Bay to the Shenandoah Valley—are where you’ll find the highest-quality, freshest, and most flavorful foods. And while it may be difficult—if not impossible—to create a diet that is entirely local, eating locally has a number of culinary, social, economic, and environmental advantages, many of which are described in these pages.

Cooking Fresh from the Mid-Atlantic is based on an old idea that is taking hold again. It is born out of the belief held by great chefs that foods grown and raised on small-scale sustainable and organic farms are the freshest, most delicious foods possible. From those chefs’ point of view-, ingredients that travel short distances from farm to table—and that are raised by skilled farmers who grow for flavor and not volume—make them look good.
The social, economic, and environmental benefits are equally compelling. Small-scale farms and the farmers who run them give more to their communities in taxes than they require in services, the farms beautify the landscape and communicate the heritage of a region, and the farmers serve as stewards of the land. Most important, small-scale farms offer a measure of food security to a region by minimizing the region’s dependence on food shipped from other parts of the country—or even other parts of the world.

Cooking Fresh from the Mid-Atlantic is not a diet book. It’s a book about what it means to connect with your region: to taste its flavors, to smell its soil, and to be invested in its future. It brings together great chefs and remarkable farmers, many of whom have been growing and raising food in the region for generations. It’s not about encouraging you to buy their products in order to artificially prop up their businesses. It’s about buying their products because they’re better than any others you can buy.
Spend some time with Cooking Fresh from the Mid-Atlantic, and then spend some time getting to know your local farmers.

Eat fresh. Eat local.

Fran McManus
Wendy Rickard
Hopewell, New Jersey
October 2002

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