In celebration of the local food movement that has sprouted up within the past few years, Indian Ladder Farms will host a Local Food Festival on Sunday, Sept. 16, from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Numerous food producers from the area including, farmers, brewers, chocolatiers, cheese makers and vintners, will be offering a tasting of their goods and merchandise for sale. There will also be chefs from popular area restaurants providing cooking demonstrations using locally grown ingredients.
We are really excited about the attention local food is getting. People are starting to acknowledge how healthy it is to buy it, said Liesl Bailey, special events coordinator for Indian Ladder.
For the past few years, Indian Ladder Farms, along with several other farms in the area, has been a strong advocate of the local food movement, which encourages people to purchase mostly all natural and organic foods that have been grown and manufactured within a 100-mile radius. Commonly known as the 100-mile diet, the goal is for people to eat fresh foods regularly that have traveled short distances or have been preserved at their seasonal peak.
According to the 100-mile diet organization’s Web site, it is estimated that most ingredients in the average North American meal have traveled more than 1,500 miles, something the organization says depletes the food of its nutritional value.
`Local food isn’t shipped, so you’re saving money not having to truck things as far and putting money back in to our local economy,` said Chris Holcomb, owner of Brown Cow Ice Cream, an all-natural product that is produced at his farm in St. Johnsville in central New York. Brown Cow Ice Cream is sold at Indian Ladder Farms and other health food stores and samples will be provided at the Local Food Festival.
Holcomb advocates buying local food because, for one thing, people can stop by the local farm to get an idea of where the food is coming from.
`You can see the animals and the people making it. You can see what’s going on,` he said.
Some restaurants are also getting in on the local food trend by incorporating as many locally grown foods into their dishes as possible.
One of these restaurants is Marche` at 74 State Street Hotel in Albany. It features a menu made up of a blend of contemporary American beef, chicken and fish entrees. At the food fest, Executive Chef Brian Molino and his team will be putting together one sweet and one savory dish using all locally grown products, including apples from Indian Ladder Farms.
`We would just like to show people the quality of using fresh local ingredients instead of overly manufactured goods,` Molino said, adding that it can be expensive and difficult to get local farm-raised meats, but that 80 percent of the produce they serve at the restaurant is from local markets.
Every month, Marche` hosts a seven-course `interactive farmers dinner` at Indian Ladder Farms, where local farmers and chefs talk about the dishes being served and answer questions from guests. The next interactive dinner will be held Friday, Sept.14 at 7 p.m.
For Laurie Ten Eyck, general manager of Indian Ladder Farms, a main reason to put on a festival like this is to ` establish a gathering spot for those interested in the local food issue, and the synergy of getting all those people together in one place.`
For information on the local food festival or Indian Ladder Farms events, visit the Web site at www.indianladderfarms.com or call 765-2956.
For more information on Marche` Restaurant at 74 State Street, visit the Web site at www.74state.com, or call 694-9178.
For more information on Brown Cow Ice Cream, call 568-2876.
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