Imagine sitting in a restaurant in a Western city and hearing from the waiter that the eggs you’re about to eat came from a farm 20 miles outside the city, that the onions came from a farm just across the road, that the peppers were grown in the restaurant’s own garden, and the cheese was made across town. This is a farm-to-table restaurant.
The phrase “farm-to-table” may not be one that everyone knows, but it is a common phrase when talking about a type of restaurant that some customers in Western countries prefer. Farm-to-table as a social movement has its origins in a famous San Francisco restaurant called Chez Panisse. Chef Alice Waters worked hard to learn where all of her ingredients came from, preferring whenever possible to find local food to serve in her restaurant. She did this because she preferred to have relationships with the people who supplied her food. A sense of trust soon developed between the staff of Chez Panisse and the farmers, and this meant reliable sources of produce for the restaurant’s customers. Since the food isn’t being shipped to the other side of the world, it can be picked when it is in season, allowing the plants to develop fully, resulting in better flavour and nutrition.
Though the farm-to-table trend started in the restaurant world, customers soon started demanding that supermarkets label where their foods come from. If you’ve ever bought blueberries from Quebec, bananas from Costa Rica, or grapes from Chile, you have seen first-hand the farm-to-table movement in action. It’s common in most supermarkets today in Western countries—and even in many Asian countries—for products to list the country of origin. This gives customers an idea of how fresh the food is likely to be or how far it has come from. This knowledge, people argue, helps customers make the best choices for themselves and their families.
The farm-to-table movement rides on the crest of the wave with three other movements: the slow food movement, the movement towards fresh seasonal ingredients, and the organic food movement. The term “slow food” was chosen to set it apart from “fast food”, but it really is not “slow” in the sense of eating or cooking food slowly. Rather, the slow food movement celebrates traditional food made with local ingredients and traditional cooking techniques. It sees a strong link between food and culture, and wants to protect local food heritage as a way of protecting local culture. As such, it heavily depends on local farmers and other food producers. While not all farm-to-table restaurants are part of the slow food movement, all slow food restaurants are essentially farm-to-table.
Prior to modern food processing and storage techniques and the use of greenhouses, most food was essentially seasonal in nature. That is, you could only find certain food ingredients at certain times of the year. As a consequence, people looked forward to seasons and seasonal celebrations in large part because of the food available at that time. Modern technology has made food much more convenient, but with that it has also taken away some of the things that made food wonderful. Not only is our food often lacking in flavour and nutrition, but we have lost touch with some of our cultural heritage and the rhythms of nature, and the joy of anticipation has been lost. As a consequence, many people are embracing seasonal cuisine by consuming only fresh ingredients that are in season. Farm-to-table goes hand-in-hand with this new emphasis, as this is one way to ensure that only fresh seasonal ingredients are being used, rather than ingredients which have been processed, which have been stored for many months at a time, or which originated in greenhouses.
The idea behind organic food is that food is grown and processed in ways that use as few chemicals as possible. This is seen as being better for our health, and better for the earth. The farm-to-table movement believes that food should be grown, shipped, stored, and prepared as naturally as possible.
Fraud, however, has become a problem in the farm-to-table movement. Investigations have shown that some supermarkets, for example, have claimed that their apples came from Washington when they really came from Mexico, and restaurants have claimed that a fish is one species when it’s a different one. Why does this matter? Because farm-to-table is a movement about trust: trust that food is grown in healthy and clean environments, and trust that the people who buy such food have developed personal relationships with the people who grow it.
Some people do not support the farm-to-table movement. They insist that the nutritional value of local food is not any greater than mass-produced food shipped from far away. At the same time, local food can cost a lot more. This has resulted in some saying that farm-to-table is a movement that meets the desires of people with money, but does not really address any actual nutritional or environmental concerns. Poor people, in other words, cannot afford to worry about where their food comes from. It is true that many poor people in the West cannot afford to buy farm-to-table food from expensive supermarkets. On the other hand, in most developing countries poor people already have farm-to-table diets because they live on or near farms and this is the only food available.
Whether farm-to-table is a long-term trend or a passing fad isn’t clear. But people today are more demanding when it comes to getting information about their food from restaurants and market owners. This new type of communication between customers and businesses is unlikely to go away anytime soon.