Farm-to-table has been a buzzword in the foodie community for a long time.
It’s a culinary trend that’s not likely to go away anytime soon. Farm to Table has been embraced by urban and rural restaurants alike. So important is the practice that at least one Michigan college – the Great Lakes Culinary Institute -- offers aspiring chefs a Farm-to-Table class.
“We needed a class that showed students how to develop a strong relationship with the area’s farmers, why that’s important to you as a chef, and what that means to your menu,” says Chef Les Eckert, who is director at the culinary institute at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City.
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Great Lakes Culinary Institue Chef Les Eckert promotes the Great Lakes Culinary Institute at the recent National Cherry Festival.The
Farm-to-Table class teaches students about plant-forward cooking practices and using seasonally available local ingredients. Students learn how to grow, harvest, menu plan, prepare, and produce food, as well as about the overall food system.
Students also work with local farmers, like Lakeview Farms, Anavery Fine Foods, Idyll Farms, and Leelanau Cheese. When students can engage with these local farmers, they build an appreciation of the food and where it comes from, Eckert says.
“If students take a job at a restaurant that has a farm, it’s not so much of a surprise because now they are seeing the impact that it makes not only on the school but on the restaurant,” Eckert says. “It helps them see that the small farms out there are working hard to make money.”
The farm-to-table movement has
grown around Michigan and the U.S. in recent years. The movement has been especially embraced in Traverse City and northwestern Michigan, where many restaurants cultivate small farms, like
Farm Club and
Pond Hill Farm or procure fresh vegetables, fruit, herbs, flowers and other food products from local growers and vendors.
Wendy Wieland, an MSU Extension Program Instructor serving Northern Lower Michigan in the area of Community Food Systems, says the idea of farm to table has been around since before World War I but became part of the public consciousness in the 1970s when Alice Waters opened her restaurant, Chez Panisse in Berkley, Calif.
“They were sourcing their food directly from growers versus the typical way that any kind of food service establishment sources food, which is through some kind of supply chain that, of course, starts with somebody growing the food but then has at least several middlemen or businesses that perform critical functions in the middle in order for that chef to then cook and plate the food that you’re going to get on your table in their restaurant,” Wieland says.
The trend has continued to grow since then as many consumers have become more conscious of what was going in store-bought foods and the widespread use of pesticides on American crops. A
study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics found that 60 percent of foods purchased by Americans contained food additives like flavoring agents, preservatives, and sweeteners, which pose a
potential threat to health.
The recent pandemic also brought more awareness of farm to table and locally grown foods, Wieland says.
“For the first time in many people's lives, they saw the fragility of supply chains across the country,” Wieland says. “People were not able to get the food products they wanted to get because that supply chain had been interrupted for a variety of reasons.”
That awareness, along with social distancing concerns, encouraged more people to frequent farmers markets. Michigan, the second most agriculturally diverse state in the country, is home to more than 300 farmers markets.
Great Lakes Culinary Institute
The Great Lakes Culinary Institute prepares young chefs with the skills they need for entry-level chef and kitchen management positions. Inside the facility is a bakery, an introductory food skills kitchen, a garde manager kitchen, an advanced cooking kitchen and Lobdell's, a teaching restaurant.
Students also have access to the school’s garden help them learn more about the process of growing food.
“We found a donor to help us purchase six tower gardens and so now we grow a lot of our lettuce and herbs and edible flowers, so it’s fewer things that we have to order and bring in,” Eckert says.
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Great Lakes Culinary InstituteEckert came to the institute in 2019; when she and the team were updating their programming, environmental stewardship was on their mind.
“Environmental stewardship isn’t a hot topic, it's a shift we are seeing in the food industry,” Eckert says. “So, we started looking into what that means, and it’s a very big umbrella word, it can mean so many things and different practices depending on what part of the food service industry you're in.”
In 2022, the school began implementing environmental stewardship into the curriculum for all classes. This means 60 percent to 70 percent of food used at the school comes from local farms. It also means eliminating as much waste as possible.
“It’s great to be able to compost, which we do and we recycle, but we try to put very little in the landfill, and we teach the students the difference,” Eckert says.
She adds it can be challenging because it’s a practice students are not familiar with – their families are composting and recycling.
Among the ways to reduce waste is by repurposing food scraps, like using coffee grounds to make coffee ice cream or a chocolate ganache, Eckert says. Or with vegetable scraps, people can chop them up and use them in veggie biscuits.
“And with zucchini, people don’t know that the stems, the leaves, and even the blossoms are all edible,” Eckert says.
The institute also practices environmental stewardship when buying non-local foods by purchasing items that use minimal plastic packaging, helping lower the carbon footprint. The restaurant is striving to use fewer disposable containers as well.
Having young chefs learn about farm to table and environmental stewardship is important because food consumers are changing, Eckert says. People are more aware of what’s in their food and what they’re putting into their bodies.
“We are still scratching the surface of what environmental stewardship looks like in our classes, how it can impact us in food and the subjects we teach in our lectures,” Eckert says. “If we keep teaching the students and they keep hearing it, hopefully, they’ll take it on when they’re out in the industry.”
About 65 students have taken the farm-to-table course. Eckhert says a few students have relayed their excitement around practicing these concepts in their careers.
Farm-to-table future
The practice is expected to continue to grow as more people become aware and interested in where food comes from and the quality of food.
A college in Colorado offers a similar farm-to-table course, and the Culinary Institute of America offers a bachelor's degree with a concentration in farm to table. Many personal chefs embrace farm to table, preferring to provide their clients with the freshest, seasonal ingredients.
There are many
reasons why restaurants are moving toward this farm-to-table approach, but the most important is that their customers appreciate the extra effort of resourcing local foods, Wieland says. Although it may be more expensive for restaurants, the bigger picture is for people to have access to healthy, fresh, affordable foods and help local farmers.
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Wendy Wieland“Chefs understand that the industry they are in is very competitive so to be able to help tell the story of a particular farmer or farms that chef is sourcing food from is really impactful,” Wieland says.
The biggest challenge is distribution. While many local farms grow enough food to feed their entire community, expanding and growing to other locations is problematic.
The concept of farm-to-table has become well-known enough, people see there is value in it, and they want to support it.
“It’s a way to reconnect with something that is arguably the most fundamental thing that we all do hopefully every day,” Wieland says. “And that’s eat food.”
Genevieve Fox is an award-winning journalist from Detroit. She recently graduated from Michigan State University with a bachelor’s in journalism with a concentration on environment, science and health policy. Previously, she was a reporter with Great Lakes Echo and WKAR radio. She loves spending time outdoors and reading a good book.