Setting the sustainable table: Local sources provide tasty alternative to the industrial food system

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July 16, 2010
by Laura Rossi-Ortiz

Advocates for a new, sustainable food system are building pathways from local farms to your table in New Castle. If you are looking for a full-time, year-round supplier of good, local food, check out TABLE Local Market located at 11 Babbitt Road in Bedford Hills.  It’s a shop that tackles the industrial food system head-on, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the volume and quality of local food it sells and the care with which local farmers and food suppliers treat the natural resources they use to produce the food.

TABLE Local Market owner Cynthia Brennan has brought her designer’s eye to the store, and it is a pleasure to experience. Items are attractively displayed on wooden tables and in baskets.  A vintage shopping cart full of bright yellow Crispin apples harkens back to a time when food shopping meant stopping by the local grocery mart.  The market is chock full of the widest variety of food that is grown and harvested for the sustainable table I have ever seen.  Every item is labeled with the source and the distance traveled. 

The number of locally sourced items available is impressive

It was an eye-opener to learn the sheer volume of locally sourced products that are available.  When I visited last week the store had a wide variety of produce, including spring onions, peas, yellow plums, lettuces, mixed greens and potatoes. There is also a large selection of dairy items, including eggs from Thomas’ Poultry in Schuyerville, NY, milk (free of bovine growth hormones and slow pasteurized) from Meadow Brook Farms in Clarksville, NY, yogurt from Evans of Norwich, NY, and Blue Moon Sorbet from Vermont.  Meat is from Dines Farms of Oak Hill, NY, and Mountain Products Smokehouse in LaGrangeville, NY.

The shop also offers a wide variety of gourmet and prepared food items. There’s a fully stocked charcuterie with a wide selection of cheese and cured meats.  If you like Indian cuisine, check out the selection of prepared Indian food from Maya Kaimal of Woodstock. In the mood for Italian?  Try ravioli from The Ravioli Store in Queens, NY. 

The most intriguing item I saw on the shelves is Big Al’s Bar-B-Q Sauce.  Al is a pediatric surgeon at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital who lives in Yorktown Heights and makes a mean sauce in his spare time.  Now there’s a multi-talented guy.

There are always new offerings at TABLE Local Market.  An email newsletter provides updates on what’s come in recently from the farm.  To receive newsletters, visit the store’s website at www.tablelocalmarket.com. 

Changing consumers’ views on sustainability one customer at a time

TABLE Local Market is on a mission.  Its investors, nearly all of them women, are passionate about building the market for a local food system that brings choice and quality to the community, and they are doing so one customer at a time. They grew tired of the tyranny of cheap food, and believe that agricultural practices drain our environmental resources, pump toxins into our bodies and strip our taste buds of real flavor awareness. So they launched this enterprise to support local farms and food producers by connecting them directly to consumers.

The folks behind TABLE Local Market are part of a global movement for sustainability that wants to ensure that we meet our current food needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.  Maybe you’ve seen the film Food, Inc., or read Michael Pollan’s

The Omnivore’s Dilemma or Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – A Year of Food Life

.  The film and books inform about the real costs of an industrial food system dependent on large-scale agribusiness.

The end result for your table: fruits and vegetables that have been frozen and pumped with chemicals, and meat that has been factory-farmed.  In addition to sacrificing taste and quality, the sheer size and volume of the industrial food system has put strains on the ecological systems that it relies on.  These strains, to water supplies, land and biodiversity itself, may take years to remedy.

You can act on this knowledge by committing to shop locally as much as possible for your food.  Stop by TABLE Local Market and become familiar with the many local vendors willing to bring their food to your table.  And there is one more reason to check out TABLE Local Market.  The owners have committed to sponsoring a Saturday market in Chappaqua that will launch in September, bringing high quality local food even closer to you.

Laura Rossi-Ortiz is a long-time Westchester resident and a member of the New Castle Sustainability Advisory Board.  Her Italian ancestors owned small family farms where they grew their own vegetables and raised their own livestock.