Remote control backyard for locavores

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July 22, 2008

A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss

By KIM SEVERSON

Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to

get to the farmer's market, let alone plant a garden?

That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque, who lives

in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard,

weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of

vegetables on the back porch when he leaves.

Call them the lazy locavores — city dwellers who insist on eating

food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands

dirty. Mr. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving

their needs.

Even couples planning a wedding at the Plaza Hotel in New York City

can jump on the local food train. For as little as $72 a person,

they can offer guests a " 100-mile menu " of food from the caterer's

farm and neighboring fields in upstate New York.

" The highest form of luxury is now growing it yourself or paying

other people to grow it for you, " said Corby Kummer, the food

columnist and book author. " This has become fashion. "

Locally grown food, even fully cooked meals, can be delivered to

your door. A share in a cow raised in a nearby field can be brought

to you, ready for the freezer — a phenomenon dubbed cow pooling.

There is pork pooling as well. At Sugar Mountain Farm in Vermont,

the demand for a half or whole rare-breed pig is so great that

people will not be seeing pork until the late fall.

Although a completely local diet is out of reach for even the most

dedicated, the shift toward it is being driven by the increasingly

popular view that fast food is the enemy and that local food tastes

better. Depending on the season, local produce can cost an

additional $1 a pound or more. But long-distance food, with its

attendant petroleum consumption and cheap wages, is harming the

planet and does nothing to help build communities, locavores believe.

As a result of interest in local food and rising grocery bills,

backyard gardens have been enjoying a renaissance across the

country, but what might be called the remote-control backyard

garden — no planting, no weeding, no dirt under the fingernails — is

a twist. " They want to have a garden, they don't want to garden, "

said the cookbook author Deborah Madison, who lives in Santa Fe,

N.M.

Her neighbor Chase Ault, a business consultant, recently had a

vegetable garden installed with a customized set of plants and a

regular service agreement. " I am working 24-7 these days, but I

wanted to have something growing in front of me, " Ms. Ault said.

Like organic food, which corporate manufacturers embraced in the

1990s, before it, local food is quickly moving into the mainstream.

Last year, the New Oxford American Dictionary picked locavore as its

word of the year. A National Restaurant Association survey this year

of more than 1,200 chefs, many of whom work for chain restaurants or

large food companies, found locally grown produce to be the second-

hottest American food trend, just behind bite-size desserts.

For a growing number of diners, a food's provenance is more

important than its brand name, said Michelle Barry, who studies

American eating patterns for the Hartman Group, a research firm in

Bellevue, Wash. As a result, grocery stores are looking to repackage

products like milk and cheese to play up any local angle.

That will be a boon to people who find that shortcuts are necessary

if they wish to eat locally. " If you live on East 80th 14 floors up

and all you have is a potted plant, it's tough, " said Lynne Rossetto

Kasper, the host of the radio show " The Splendid Table, " who

recruited 15 listeners for a study on the subject. Researchers will

record their struggles to make 80 percent of their meals from

organic or local sources. Spices are the only exemption.

Lazy locavores would never go to such extremes. Rather, they might

simply sign up with the FruitGuys. The company, which has offices in

San Francisco and Philadelphia, will deliver boxes of local,

sustainably raised or organic fruit right to the cubicle.

In the mood for a meal that reeks of community but does not

necessitate a communal activity? Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley,

Calif., which describes itself as a community supported kitchen,

offers its customers the opportunity to make friends while making

food from local, sustainable farms, but the worker-owned company

also offers online shopping for people who do not have the time to

pick up orders or participate in educational activities.

Customers 20 miles away in the affluent community of Mill Valley,

for example, can pay $15 to have jars filled with Andalusian stew,

made with pasture-raised pork, delivered to their door. The jars, of

course, are returnable.

" It's a very savvy crowd that understands how all the pieces of

sustainable farming and nutrition fit together, " said Larry Wisch,

one of five worker-owners at Three Stone Hearth. " But they don't

want the headaches of getting here. "

Or you could just have your private chef handle all your local food

needs. At their Hamptons summer house, John and Lorna Brett Howard

want to eat almost exclusively local, which means that in place of

one trip to the grocery store, their chef, Michael Welch, makes

several trips to farm stands and the fishmonger.

" What I'm seeing with my clients is not the trendiness or the

politics, " Mr. Welch said. " They are looking only at taste. "

Mrs. Howard said she ate local vegetables growing up in northern

Michigan and Chicago. But her husband, a private equity fund

manager, ate a lot of expensive imported food with little thought

about where it came from. But all that has changed.

" It's like the first time you start drinking good red wine and you

realize what you were drinking was so bad you can't go back to it, "

Mrs. Howard said. " It's that same way with vegetables. "

The author Barbara Kingsolver, whose book " Animal, Vegetable,

Miracle " was a best seller last year, did not have the lazy locavore

in mind when she wrote about the implications of making her family

spend a year eating local. But she celebrates the trend.

" As a person of rural origin who has lived much of my life in rural

places, " she said, " I can't tell you how joyful it makes me to hear

that it's trendy for people in Manhattan to own a part of a cow. "

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company