What you see pictured above is the dinner I cooked up last night, in which all of the major ingredients of each dish were procured from the CitySeed farmers' market in Wooster Square, New Haven, CT. You're looking at a pesto made from the garlic scapes, olive oil, and parmesan; an escarole-arugala salad tossed in a simple vinegrette; and two links of lamb, garlic, and fennel sausage. The pesto alone would have made this a red-letter day. How often do you get to discover a new vegetable -- one you've not only never tried, but never even heard of before? The scapes turned out to be extremely mild in their garlic flavor, and also carried flavors resembling asparagus and fiddle-head ferns. If a basil pesto tastes like late summertime, this one was the essence of spring. But that wasn't the half of it. Even being as unadorned as it was, the damn salad almost stole the show. I guess I just tend to forget how tasty greens themselves can be when you eat them fresh out of the ground. And the lamb sausage, like anything made with good lamb, was deliciously meaty. Even for all its homey simplicity -- it was just pasta, salad, and sausage, after all -- this was one of the best meals I've had in recent memory.
Now I'm all for eating locally-sourced foods for all the familiar reasons: I try to eat as healthy as I can, I like to support local producers, and I'm happy to reduce my carbon footprint and all that. But more than anything, as this meal reminded me, I eat them first and foremost because they taste good -- damn good, in fact.
I wonder, though, why this isn't more often part of the message put out there by the local-food movement. I suppose we all feel some small measure of virtue in eating healthy ingredients, and buying them from folks nearby in lieu of buying stuff that may be cheaper but was produced a world away. But really, why try to sell people deprivation and self-sacrifice, when you can sell them pleasure instead?
Eat local: it just tastes good.
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