Celeste Taylor is running. A goat milker, wearing black waders, muddy jeans and a flannel, she's talking to herself. There's no time to waste. Thunder and lightning over the hill's crest mean one thing: get the goats in, now.
The milking machine sounds like the outboard motor on a speedboat, flushing water through plastic pipes. The milkers are ready now, ready to slip onto an udder and pump the milk that is the life blood of Chris Chmiel's business.
BooBoo the mutt patrols the goats’ march to the milking machine with a rotting goat leg in his mouth. The two-hour milking process begins. From udder to table, this milk becomes cheese that is eaten by customers at restaurants across Athens County and beyond. Most will never visit where it's produced, a holler between rolling green hills near Albany — a picturesque scene of wooden fence posts and horned milk machines that feed thousands.
Integration Acres, a farm owned by Chris Chmiel and his wife Michelle, primarily produces local goat cheese and pawpaws. With more than 60 goats, the farm has produced cheese for nine years.
Describing the way a local product reaches an Athens eatery is simple. Quantifying how much food makes it from local farms to local tables is much harder.
The Post contacted local businesses that are listed as members of the 30 Mile Meal Plan, an Athens County Visitor’s Bureau marketing campaign meant to promote Athens-area businesses that buy local food for resale. Twenty-seven businesses are listed as meal plan “partners,” 20 of which are local restaurants or food vendors. Of those 20, 12 responded to The Post. Several local food producers associated with the meal plan also talked to the newspaper.
The meal plan, started in 2010, is part of a larger area food movement to buy and eat local, making Athens a “mecca” for local food addicts, said Chris Chmiel, an Athens County Commissioner, founder of the PawPaw Festival and owner of Integration Acres.
The meal plan suggests businesses support local food producers, but members do not have to demonstrate any level of commitment. Bottom line: there is no way to quantify how much or little local businesses are doing to support the local food movement, even if you ask them.
Some businesses contacted by The Post said they are no longer members of the plan while others said they never were. Few businesses could offer percentages for how much food they bought locally. Most that did said it is just an estimate, a number that varied from 15 to 80 percent between businesses. Some displayed keen enthusiasm for the meal plan, while others said buying local is just too hard.
“The biggest challenge with assessing the impact of anything food related is they’re not taxed like a retail, hotel or gas transaction,” said Paige Alost, the head of the visitor’s bureau and someone who helped create the meal plan, acknowledging the meal plan’s impact is hard to track.
There are some numbers: for every $10 spent at a locally owned business, about $7 stays in the community, said Leslie Schaller, director of programming for the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks in Athens, better known as ACENet.
Athens County ranks 84 out of Ohio’s 88 counties in total value of agricultural products sold, according to the 2012 Census of Agriculture. Athens top crop and livestock items are land used to produce hay — 23rd in Ohio — and nearly 7,500 cattle and calves — 61st in Ohio.
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Though many business owners and local food producers agree eating Athens County food is typically more expensive, some argue the benefits to personal health, the local economy and the environment outweigh the upfront cost.
Large federal subsidies to corporations have created a food market that favors serving unhealthy, non-local food, though that is changing, said Brandon Jaeger, owner of Shagbark Seed & Mill, a local company known for the chips it produces with beans and grains from family farms within Ohio and western Pennsylvania, though not necessarily within 30 miles of Athens.
“Local food systems are not only healthier for our bodies, our environment and our communities, but also more economically competitive,” Jaeger said.
And for each business that has a commitment to local cuisine, while often paying more for it, there are many other fast food or chain stores that do not purchase 30-mile food, leaving Athens’ restaurant owners grumbling.
Local producers often cannot offer the lower wholesale prices of regional or national brands, sometimes making it difficult to make a profit off local food, said Kevin Tidd, co-owner of The Farmacy, a nutrition supplement and health-food store on Stimson Avenue.
“(The) local vendor wants me to pay the same thing to them for what they’ll charge for full blown retail,” he said.
The local food movement is undoubtedly a budding national trend. Between 1994 and 2013, the number of farmers markets in the United States increased 360 percent to more than 8,000 markets, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Between 1992 and 2007, local food sales tripled and national surveys cited by the USDA show a growing interest from consumers in buying local food.
In Athens County, there has been a 23 percent increase in the number of farms between 2007 and 2012 — from 585 to 722 — and a 13 percent increase in the market value of agricultural products sold — from $8.4 million to $9.5 million, according to the census.
Yet Alost believes Athens’ “grassroots commitment to knowing where our food comes from” is unlike anywhere else in the country.
But not all local business owners say they can be on board with the local food movement.
“It pisses me off a little bit when people wear it on their sleeve and say everything can be local,” said Hilarie Burhans, co-owner and executive chef of Restaurant Salaam, an exotic upscale eatery on Washington Street.
She said about 15 percent of her food comes locally, but products like lamb must come from New Zealand and Australia because the quality is better. Pricing, variable weather and food choice also make it difficult to buy more products locally.
“Nobody makes it easy in this business to do the right thing,” said Burhans, a short, fiery woman with black-rimmed glasses who grew up everywhere from Massachusetts to Ethiopia. She strives to bring an international flavor to Athens with her restaurant. Unfortunately, doing so requires less of a reliance on local food.
She does not post the meal plan’s sticker — a colorful rooster with the plan’s slogan “Real Food, Real Local” — in her restaurant’s Uptown window.
Bob O’Neil, owner of the Village Bakery and Café, said his business is dedicated to local food and the local economy. His eatery on East State Street in Athens displays a board that details where the bakery’s products come from.
“When you go to a local restaurant and they’re not using 100 percent local Snowville (milk) or dairy in their production, you’re not in a real 30 mile meal location,” O’Neil said. He called the meal plan “a way of life” and estimated 50 percent of his products are locally sourced, among the highest in the county.
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It is difficult to pinpoint when Athens’ local food movement began, but most restaurant owners and food producers believe the county has had a commitment to eating local for the past few decades. Casa Nueva Restaurant and Cantina started in the mid-1980s, a restaurant many local foodies cite as one of the first local eateries to consciously source its food locally.
The 30 Mile Meal Plan is an outgrowth of that “local food and art economy,” says Alost. She said her goal was to create the nation’s first “super-local” meal plan to further a belief in Athens that healthy, local food is “attached to our well-being.”
At its heart, the 30 Mile Meal Plan is both a marketing campaign and an effort to grow local farmers and food entrepreneurs, said Schaller, the programming director at ACEnet. Since the business development organization began in 1985, ACEnet has always had a focus on supporting rural farmers and businesses interested in sourcing local food products, Schaller said.
Supporting the meal plan is part of ACEnet’s broader business incubation mission, launching more than 300 businesses since 1996. ACEnet also provides meal plan members with business planning, marketing and applying for grants, Schaller said.
Casa Nueva, which opened the same year as ACEnet, was one of the first businesses to support the local food industry and is recognized by many as a locavore powerhouse in Athens.
“We consider ourselves one of the pioneers in this area,” said Sarah Slater, Casa’s food coordinator. She estimated 50-60 percent of Casa’s food comes locally, including eggs, meats like chicken and beef, peppers and seasonal vegetables.
The restaurant has a seasonal menu that changes every three weeks, depending partly on what local food is in season. Starting in early April, Casa started serving a seasonal burrito with spinach pesto and Gruyere cheese. The cheese comes from Laurel Valley Creamery 50 miles down the road in Gallipolis, and the spinach pesto comes from Green Edge Gardens and Shade River Organic Farms, both located in Athens County. A roasted cremini, shitake and button mushroom medley goes in those burritos, with all ingredients grown locally by Mushroom Harvest, a grower also based in Athens.
Art Oestrike, the black-bearded, often beanie-wearing owner of Jackie O’s Pub and Brewery, said he’s been committed to scouring the local countryside to find products to use in his baked bread or other meals since he opened his now-mainstay establishment on Union in 2005.
Jackie O’s beer and bread are brewed and baked in Athens — the bread will be baked at the restaurant’s Union Street location after the kitchen is repaired from the fire, and the beer is brewed at the Jackie O’s Tap Room off of Stimson Avenue.
But the ingredients come from much further away. Grain for the breads is grown all over the Midwest and malted in Wisconsin before it is sent to Athens, Oestrike said. No one near Athens annually grows the “50,000 acres of grain” it would require for his product, he said.
Hops for Jackie O’s famed locally brewed beer come from even further away, with most of the key beer ingredient shipped from the Pacific Northwest and as far away as New Zealand. “Nobody in Ohio has the amount that we would need,” Oestrike said.
Altogether, the Jackie O’s owner says more than 80 percent of what he sells is local, the highest percentage The Post found.
“We’re all stepping upon the shoulders of Casa, who’ve been doing this forever before us,” he said.
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King Family Farms, Green Edge Gardens and Frog Ranch Foods are just a few Athens County food producers that sell to local businesses feeding Athens residents.
Julie Garner runs The Gold Family Farm, a 3-acre farm in Athens County between Athens and Albany. The farm produces vegetables and eggs that come from the roughly 100 chickens and six ducks that roam the property, some of which is sold to local businesses. The farm also invites locals to pick pumpkins during fall weekends. Garner manages the Nelsonville Farmers Market, whose six vendors sell fresh and organic food from May through October.
The Nelsonville market, along with the Athens Farmers Market, are two key ways Athens County residents can buy fresh, local food, Garner said. Especially in Nelsonville, the market supplies the local folks so they don’t have to drive to Athens or Logan.
Another grower of local produce, Becky Rondy, loves the idea of eating locally. But the co-owner of Green Edge Gardens, a 120-acre certified-organic farm in Amesville, is unsure how much the 30 Mile Meal Plan has done for local food producers.
The meal plan netted Green Edge one new customer — Abrio’s Restaurant, an eatery on East State Street that is now closed, Rondy said. The meal plan’s impact was “good for a while but it did not last,” she added. “I have not seen a huge impact in our sales.”
Buying local food is “built into our little, local Athens culture. That’s the kind of experience people all over the United States should be able to experience,” she said. But convincing businesses to participate beyond those that already rely on local food is difficult, said Rondy, whose farm is most-known for selling microgreens, mushrooms, heirloom tomatoes and ginger at the Athens Farmer’s Market and to locals who pay for weekly deliveries of vegetables.
The farm distributes about 175 bags of vegetables each week during two 20-week cycles each year, Rondy said. She could not say how many people receive food from the farm.
Similarly, Neal Dix, owner of Shade Winery, which uses predominantly local grapes grown on-site to produce more than a dozen wines, is not sure how much the meal plan has done for his sales, with 75 percent of his business solely based on customers visiting his Athens County winery.
“People don’t show up and say, ‘Hey, we saw the 30 Mile Meal plan. We’re from Columbus.’ That hasn’t happened,” Dix said.
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Connie Davidson did not realize she is still considered a member of the 30 Mile Meal plan. Neither did Ed Fisher. That’s because these Athens-area business owners feel limited by the food offered from local producers.
Davidson struggles to find fresh fruit in the winter and Kroger is a more consistent supplier of bacon for Sand Ridge Bed and Breakfast’s customers each Saturday morning, despite the fact her website says she gets bacon from Albany-based King Family Farms, one of the major pork and chicken suppliers in the county. In the past, she tried to buy her food for her business locally, but now she doesn’t post the meal plan’s sticker in her window. That logo, however, is still on her website.
“I wish I could say I got 90 percent of my food from local people,” said Davidson.
Fisher’s menu is too diverse to be consistently sourced from local food products. The owner of Purple Chopstix, a self-dubbed “eclectic” restaurant on Richland Avenue in Athens, said he has been “local and organic” as much as possible for 25 years.
“What part of the menu constitutes 30 miles I can’t really say,” Fisher said.
Burhans, the Salaam co-owner, said high prices make it challenging to buy products locally.
For example, buying local honey costs four-times as much as another option. And for her grilled lamb kabobs in Turkish marinade, she has found that local lamb costs far more than higher quality lamb shipped from Australia or New Zealand.
“I don’t think I’ve ever put the (meal plan) sticker on the door,” Burhans said. “No one’s ever really defined for me what this means.”
Those higher prices are worth it to many local business owners, like Jessica Kopelwitz, owner of The Fluff Bakery on Court Street. Supporting local food producers makes “your community financially stable,” she said. In the summer, more than 80 percent of her food is sourced locally.
“People think it’s so much more expensive,” Kopelwitz said. “In reality, sometimes it is but it’s a better value to have food that tastes a lot better and a product that’s ten-times better quality.”
dd195710@ohio.edu
@WillDrabold
