“People come here in February and are like, ‘Oh I hear you’re all local.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, well, have you looked outside? It’s a tundra out there,’” Marshall says in his usual dry humor. “I could serve pickled foods and I could come up with some way of freezing and canning…or only serving reindeer sausage in the winter, but I feel like in the restaurant industry people want to eat foods that are out of season.”

But with a reputation as a restaurant that serves local food, Marshall tries to stick to his guns when he can. He says he attempts to anticipate what will be in demand, but also provides seasonal fare that people will want once they hear that it’s in season.

The winter menu includes a chutney from frozen Flathead cherries with pork shoulder sausage, as well as a winter squash and leek pizza.

“So I stockpile 500 pounds of winter squash in the basement to try to use as much seasonal things as possible. Conversely, people e-mail me in the summer and say, ‘Why did you take the cherry chutney pizza off the menu?’ It’s like, “Well, because we have arugula now,’” he says, laughing.

Marshall bought 50 pounds of figs last year that lasted all winter. When he got dried porcini mushrooms from local musician and mushroom hunter Charlie Hopkins, he made porcini oil that lasted the entire winter.

“You just gotta be resourceful and get things from local people as much as you can. I love the challenge,” he says.

Both Marshall and Buser at the Catalyst are sympathetic to restaurant owners who don’t make it a priority to buy local. Last minute decisions and the need for menu flexibility make it a challenge. But for them, it works.

“It would be shortsighted pennywise and pound foolish for me to use convenience products…for short-term gain,” Marshall says. “And if, God forbid, we couldn’t get anything out of the state because of resource limitations or any kind of blockades in any respect, if we don’t have a sustainable program in place, we’re going to be lost.”


Day Six: Community Garden Raid

Today’s goal: Make a vegetarian meal from food that can be found in a community garden.
Breakfast: Coffee from The Good Food Store, $12.99 per pound.
Lunch: Leftovers from Biga Pizza.
Dinner: Zucchini bake with yellow squash, zucchini, squashed golden tomatoes (to emulate sauce), carrots and Lifeline butter, all layered with Lifeline cheddar and Montzarella cheese. Cost includes a Garden City Harvest Community Garden plot, $40, and seeds for the vegetables, $1.50 per packet.

It’s not that I have headaches or can’t live without the taste of coffee for a week, but I just can’t seem to get myself in gear. So I break down and get a cup of coffee, making sure it’s Fair Trade and labeled with its point of origin—Nicaragua, where I happened to travel a year and a half ago. I figure that’s almost like local food for me.

Ari LeVaux then explains to me that eating purely local food doesn’t have to be an absolute and that things like coffee and spices are fine. They’re “slow boat” items that last without refrigeration, which means less impact on the planet than, say, a banana. I feel a lot better.

I head down at dusk to the UM Community Gardens where several people I know have garden plots. My mom remembers raiding gardens, and there’s something romantic about the idea of climbing over a fence at night to taste the cool flesh of a cucumber or the startling tartness of raspberries, all stolen and, therefore, forbidden. My mom says the woman she stole raspberries from finally caught her and said, “If you’d just ask, I’d give you some.”

Perhaps the stolen fruit tastes better, but in my case I take the safer route and ask if I can scrounge through the huge, prickly leaves of my friends’ green patches to find myself a squash or two. I also find some golden tomatoes and carrots, and I take just enough for a meal. My kitchen, in fact, is getting quite full of local food. And I’m finding that I have more than enough to choose from.

Before I make a zucchini bake, I talk with an old classmate of mine, Paul Hubbard. For his Environmental Studies master’s degree, Hubbard is trying to keep agricultural land under the stewardship of farmers and ranchers. His program—which falls under the umbrella of CFAC—acts like a matchmaking service between land-seeking farmers and producer-seeking landowners.

“There are a lot of barriers to farmers getting onto land,” he says. “Land Link is a resource to link farmers and ranchers with landowners who want to see their land in agriculture, and also bringing in the other tools and technical assistance for making that transition happen.”

Hubbard has also been meeting with the city to discuss smart development of land where, he says, developers and city officials have to collaborate for preservation of agricultural land to work. The fact that developers and the city are actually talking about local food—whether they all agree or not—constitutes progress.

“In some places community gardens are going to be appropriate, in others it will be small and medium-sized farms within subdivisions with dwelling units arranged around the farmland,” he says. “It’s going to be part of our food-secure future. This isn’t a prescription solution. We really need creativity and some collaborative leadership from the development community.”


Hubbard studied various agricultural/residential development solutions utilized by other states. A mitigation ordinance in Davis, Calif., for instance, states that for every acre of farmland lost to development, two acres must be preserved. Another tactic is similar to carbon trading. In this case, development rights transfer from agricultural lands (which gain easements to preserve them in perpetuity) to desired areas of high-density growth. Hubbard’s Land Link program is another preservation strategy.

“We need to start taking an active role in planning how we’re going to eat,” he says. “We’re going to be very hungry if we continue to rely on outside sources and we’re going to be paying for all the oil to get it here.”


Day Seven: Food security

Today’s goal: Showcase local items at the Food Bank that are accessible to low-income residents.
Breakfast: Eggs over-medium, toast and bacon at the Catalyst, $6.
Lunch: Leftover zucchini bake.
Dinner: Swiss chard steamed and then cooked in butter, mixed greens with tomatoes and canned carrots, toast with butter and a side of canned apples. All free with interview and completed paperwork at the Food Bank.

Eight of the 10 poorest counties in the United States are in Montana and every single one of those counties is agriculturally based.

At the Missoula Food Bank the number of people coming in for food reached a record high in April, and Nick Roberts, the Food Bank’s development director, says he’s pretty sure July beat that record. Roberts takes me through the process of how a person who needs food might obtain it at the Food Bank, and what access they have to fresh local produce.

First, clients fill out a basic identification form and then volunteers check to make sure they’re not going over their limit of two visits per month. Clients sit in a partitioned desk for a little privacy while they consult with the volunteer, getting a chance to learn about other resources and services they might need. Then they take a shopping cart and a customized list—determined by family size—of items from which they are allowed to pick. Local food makes up a major part of the fresh produce. Garden City Harvest contributes fresh veggies daily, along with some other local farmers who donate their harvests.

“It’s so valuable on many different levels,” says Roberts. “They allow us to have a bigger variety on our shelves, period. We do not buy perishable goods ever. We can’t afford to do that. But also—and we hear this directly from clients—it’s a meaningful interaction on intangible levels when clients know that they’re getting food grown here. It reconnects them to the land and their community that they’re not going to have access to with their own checkbook…That’s as poignant as it gets.”

Bonnie Buckingham, who has a long history working with the Food Bank and is now coordinator of CFAC, says fresh, local food shouldn’t only be available to those who can afford it.

“Because, really, if you say, ‘Okay, you can have a pound of carrots or six macaroni and cheese dinners,’ what are you going to do?” she asks. “If your kids are hungry, macaroni and cheese is going to feed them for a lot longer than a few carrots. It’s choices that they have to make and it’s not really their ignorance or lack of interest. People want to provide healthy food for their kids and if they can’t economically do that, they do what they can.”

I roll my cart to the local produce section where Roberts points out what I can take for my local food meal that day. There’s some swiss chard, a tomato, Wheat Montana bread and mixed greens. In the canned food section there’s another interesting local—or, at least, Montana-made—product. White-labeled cans with stark drawings of fruit and vegetables line the shelf, filled with preserved carrots and apples, all processed and canned in the Deer Lodge Prison. I take one of each.

“I believe that food is a right for all people,” says Buckingham about the importance of including low-income families in the local food network. “And giving people choices about the food they consume—and it is a very personal choice—it’s something that everyone can relate to in some way because everyone has to eat, so everyone is a stakeholder in developing our food system.”


Full pantry, full stomach

This wasn’t hard. I have a refrigerator full of locally grown food and a new-found respect for slow boat ingredients. I’ve learned that being a locavore can be accomplished, especially if you get over the misperception that it’s about depriving yourself. It’s not. It’s about eating thoughtfully.

That said, the network is not nearly as strong as it needs to be to shift our current reliance—that 90 percent figure—on out-of-state food. As Missoula continues to grow and develop, and the population increases, advocates like Slotnick, Hassanein, McMullan, Hubbard, Buser, Marshall, Buckingham and Roberts face a persistent challenge.

“The global economy institutionalizes a global ignorance in which producers and consumers cannot know or care about one another,” writes farmer and author Wendell Berry, “and in which all the histories of our products will be lost.”

And Slotnick agrees that no matter how noble, moral, thoughtful or caring we are as people, not knowing where our food comes from (or any other item) makes us not care about it. But he does see some remedies for the situation if we all decide to make major changes to state and federal funding.

“I’m not opposed at all to subsidizing the kind of world that we want,” he says. “We subsidize agriculture right now to a great degree and we could redirect that. Our state has this humongous surplus this year…and if someone wants to start a food processing type entity in eastern Montana, hire [local] people and use products created there—oh my God! Let’s get them grants, no-interest loans.”

In other words, taking an interest in food as not just a commodity, but a conduit to creating meaningful relationships to the ground we stand on and the people with whom we interact; that’s what counts here.