Black Radishes & Purple Peppers: The rewards of buying locally

What drives me as a cook is seeing ingredients I’ve never seen before. I left my first cooking job because I came to the end of the road with ingredients. We were continually using ingredients I had seen or worked with before and I knew there was more out there.

It was at my second cooking job that I really saw ingredients. Every Thursday morning our produce shipments would come in. At 9 a.m. on the dot eight different purveyors would squeeze through a narrow alleyway into a tiny kitchen and unload all the produce on the pastry counters. And in my 22 years, it was the first time I was really seeing what fennel, carrots, radishes, and kidney beans really were. They were roots; they were long and vivid; they were black radishes; they were purple peppers; and they were unlike anything I had ever seen in a supermarket.

These basic forms of produce are so much different than the produce you find in a supermarket. And it’s this way because of the unfortunate power of consistency. Consistency is nice. It is a way to make everything almost the same almost all of the time. People like consistency. And like sex, consistency sells. Consistency is also why we do not have purple peppers in supermarkets.

Consistency is what supermarkets like Giant, Shop Rite, Pathmart, and many other chain grocery stores favor. In a quote from “The Ethical Gourmet” by Jay Weinstein, he explains the power of supermarkets over farmers: “Supermarkets also favor suppliers who can deliver consistent produce in predictable quantities. By shunning local growers whose quality is better but crop size is unpredictable, these markets are starving the local farm economies, making the farms ever less able to produce the desired volume”.

Essentially, large corporate supermarkets are not selling you purple peppers or black radishes because local farmers, whose farms often produce such produce, (due to irregular seeding and genetics) are irregular. As this may not come as a shock, these unpredictable pieces of produce (say that 10 times fast!) will almost never be found in large chain stores. Thus, making your best chances of finding weird, unusual produce, in a restaurant or on a farm stand.

My experiences with discovering real produce have created the need to find more of it. About 85% of the produce (all organic and fair trade) we received in the restaurant in Washington, D.C. came from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland. The importance of buying locally and supporting local farmers is paramount if you ever wish to really see fennel tower to 4ft, taste spicy black radishes, and taste mildly sweet purple peppers. You’ll be helping farmers, reduce air pollution, and oh ya, taste produce that is unlike anything you have bought in a chain grocery store.