Local food, farmers celebrated
by Bret Bradigan

Any number of parallels could be drawn between starting a new publication and farming. It takes a fertile and salutory environment, lots of patient cultivation, and, most of all, an appreciative market, before it will bear fruit.
With her first crop harvested, Tracey Ryder is finishing the second issue of Edible Ojai, a quarterly newsletter "honoring the abundance of local foods, season by season," according to its dateline. It is due to hit the streets in mid-July, and will feature a lineup of articles about Santa Maria barbecue, community-supported agriculture, and a story by Jim Churchill on fellow farmer Camille Sears' passion for stone fruits such as peaches and apricots, of which she raises 90 varieties on five acres.
Ryder has had a lifelong interest in food and farming, since growing up amid an abundance of homegrown foods in upstate New York. "We raised everything. We really did live by the seasons. It is in my genes to think about food this way."
Awareness is rapidly growing that what's good for our health is also good for the health of the planet, as witnessed by the populist protests against McDonald's in France, or the burgeoning slow-foods movement coming from Italy. In the United States, Alice Waters' Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley has formed the fulcrum for a movement of enjoying locally-grown foods, in season, and elegantly prepared.
Ryder, a food life-style devotee herself, saw Ojai as a perfect place to mirror these concerns. "We can actually have seasonal produce year-round here," she said. "We have one of the best eco-climates around."
The local foods movement could briefly be described as "anything you can get your hands on with a day's drive," she said.
As co-owner with partner Carole Topalian of Elements, a design and graphics firm, Ryder has consulted with lots of food and wine industry experts, which gave her some insight into the commercial possibilities of linking producers with consumers.
Other influences came from reading. One recent selection Ryder mentioned was "Coming Home to Eat: the Pleasure and Politics of Local Foods," by Gary Paul Nabhan. Nabhan spent a year trying to eat foods grown, fished, or gathered within 250 miles of his home in Tucson, Ariz. That journey underscores Nabhan's conviction that we have too easily believed "the vacuous nutritional promises of the industrialized food that has sold our health down the river." Even in the heart of the Sonora desert, Nabhan found through his research, it is more cost-effective to raise foods locally - the expense of water is cheaper than the expense of processing, packaging, trucking, refrigeration and marketing, not to mention the ecological cost in pesticides and pollutants.
Edible Ojai newsletter has expanded from 16 to 24 pages for this summer issue, and from 7,500 copies to 10,000. She has several advertisers committed for the whole year, and several hundred subscribers have signed up. "And they just don't send checks," she said. "They send letters, cards, notes - it's amazing."
Future features and plans include articles on Chumash farming, Ojai's historic olive groves, restaurant updates, locally grown and nationally distributed foods, a website, gift baskets of local products, a contribution from Ojai Valley Inn & Spa's Merrill Williams on the inn's Saveur Magazine event, and perhaps even to plan an Edible Ojai-related event herself.
Subscriptions are $28 per year, payable to Edible Ojai, P.O. Box 184, Ojai, CA 93024.

© 2002 The Ojai Valley News

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