Chefs Collaborative promotes local foods

There is still snow on the ground in the Inland Northwest when the first strawberries begin arriving in the local grocery stores. Jennifer Hall doesn’t touch them.

Hall, the executive director of Chefs Collaborative, can wait. She’ll pass on the berries until she can pluck them from the plants at a local farm or buy at the farmers’ market.

Why? Because they taste better, because it takes fewer fossil fuels to bring them to her, because it preserves local farms and the area’s food culture, she says.

Hall lives in Spokane, but she oversees an organization which reaches across the country. The Chefs Collaborative works with more than 1,000 chefs and food communities to promote local foods and sustainable farming practices by connecting its members with farmers, ranchers and artisan producers. It also brings information to its members about sustainable seafood and natural, grass-fed meats.

A local chapter has recently taken root in Spokane. More than 90 people came to the initial meeting, Hall says.

“We try to give them the tools so they feel equipped to ask the right questions and understand the answers,” Hall says.

Chefs also need to be prepared to give those answers to diners, says David Blaine of Latah Bistro. Restaurant goers are asking more questions than ever before about how food is produced and where it comes from, he says.

“We have to be educated because the consumer is educated,” he says.

Chef Peter Tobin, an instructor at the Spokane Community College’s Inland Northwest Culinary Academy, agrees. It’s becoming an important discussion across the country, he says.

One thing that makes the local chapter of Chefs Collaborative unique is that it has partnered with the American Culinary Federation’s Chefs de Cuisine of the Inland Northwest. When 400 chefs of the ACF’s Western region meet next April in Coeur d’Alene, part of the program will include education on supporting local and sustainable foods in the restaurants, Tobin says.

What all of this will eventually mean for consumers is more local and sustainable food choices, Hall says.

“If you know where your food is coming from and you go to the farm where it was grown and you see those foods listed on the restaurant menu … you can have comfort in knowing that it not only tastes great, but it’s good for you and it’s good for the earth.”

For more information about Chefs Collaborative go to www.chefscollaborative.org.