ATTACK OF THE $3 TOMATO (4 pg article)
How Portland's snooty tastes are saving Oregon farms, luring kids back to the land and even-gasp!-teaching Republicans and Democrats to get along.
BY ZACH DUNDAS
Last week, the meat counter at New Seasons Market on Southeast Division Street-as good a place as any to observe Portland's organic-shopping, local-arugula-worshipping foodies in their native habitat-offered juicy-looking steak...for $13.99 a pound.
Why would anyone slap down more than a ten-spot for a pound of cow flesh when they could buy the same amount of the exact same cut for about $7.50 at Safeway, just blocks away on Southeast Hawthorne?
Or, for that matter, who would pay New Seasons $3.99 for a pint of blueberries when the same Safeway sells it for a buck less?
The answer, in both cases, has nothing to do with the way the American consumer is supposed to behave in the globalized, big-box, Chinese-made 21st century. Instead, it has everything to do with where that spendy meat and those blue-chip blueberries came from: Oregon.
Forget "organic," long the label coveted by that cross-section of hippies, yuppies, bourgeois bohemians and gourmets. Increasingly, "local" is the new buzzword chowhounds are chasing.
At the height of summer's bounty, signs of the trend are not hard to find. New Seasons, a Portland-owned chain that employs two full-time people to scout for local food, soon will open its sixth location since launching in 2000, and will surpass 1,000 employees. Portland's farmers markets, confined to a single obscure location little more than a decade ago, are everywhere-at least two dozen in the metro area. The largest, held Saturdays on Portland State's campus, boasts 140 vendors and a two-year waiting list for stalls. And local restaurants are engaged in something of a local-produce arms race to see who can trumpet the most eccentric, specific Oregon-grown specimens.
"'Local' is much bigger than organic now," says Tanya Murray, a Sauvie Island farmer who supplies salad mix to Portland restaurants. "It started with white-tablecloth places. Now it's trickling down. There's a place in St. Johns that has lottery machines but still wants to say it sells Sauvie Island salad. There's more demand than we can possibly keep up with."
Yet the best evidence that the buying habits of a small faction packs a real effect is not found in a gourmet grocery or hip bistro.
Buried in dry data spreadsheets cranked out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture lies a dramatic tale: At a time when small farmers are dying out across America, the number of farmers in Oregon is on the rise. The latest USDA "agriculture census" showed the number of full-time farmers in Oregon increasing more than 55 percent from 13,884 in 1974 to 21,580 in 2002, the last year the USDA surveyed. Part-time farming, where many growers who specialize in farmers markets and other buy-local niches begin, is up, too.
In contrast to farmers' plight nationwide-endless Willie Nelson benefits notwithstanding, about 300,000 farms have disappeared since 1980-Oregon's farming renaissance is stunning. In Illinois, for example, about 33,000 farms turned out the lights between 1974 and 2002.
Growers and industry analysts ascribe the increase in Oregon farmers to a growing number of small- and medium-sized operations designed to meet increasing demand for local grub.
"Farmers markets are growing by 10 percent a year," says Larry Lev, a marketing economist with Oregon State University's agriculture extension service. "The rest of agriculture isn't growing like that. The niche is serving a lot of good ends, and one of them is bringing bright, energetic people into agriculture who never would have dreamed of it otherwise."
To be sure, the "local" food industry represents just a spit in the ocean of Oregon's $3.8 billion agricultural economy. Most food grown in Oregon gets shipped elsewhere and the majority of food consumed in the state gets trucked in, just as in the rest of the country. (According to a 2001 Iowa State University study, the average dinner travels 1,500 miles from farm to plate.) But some Portlanders' finicky insistence on eating local is changing things: luring a new generation of savvy sodbusters-many of them women-onto the land, keeping old farm families in business, even forging new bonds between ultra-liberal urbanites and the Republican hinterland beyond.
All this has some proclaiming Portland the bellwether of some not-yet-defined revolution. "It's in the food-savvy city of Portland that the new food economy has taken root," says a July 31 feature in the Los Angeles Times, "and where the future may be taking shape."
The future? That's a bold claim in the age of the Golden Arches. But something's happening down on the farm, and some think pricey blueberries mark just the beginning.
Once, the "organic" label appealed only to the crunchiest of the crunchy: the co-op member, the carob-chip eater, the composting zealot. Thanks to increasingly mainstream worries about pesticides, the environment and genetic engineering, Fred Meyer and Safeway now feature all-organic sections in their produce department.
But the growing appeal of "local" is a little more complicated. (As is the definition. Some local-food proponents speak of a "foodshed" of about 150 miles in any direction. New Seasons, which recently unveiled a new promotional campaign to push "homegrown" foods, counts anything produced in the ...
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