Brandon Johns is the executive chef and co-owner of Vinology, wine bar and restaurant on Main Street in Ann Arbor. I met with him last week to talk about his passion for local food and how he highlights local ingredients at Vinology.

Chef Brandon says that he started seeking out local foods because they are simply the freshest, most flavorful ingredients available. No tomato picked green and shipped from California can possibly compete with a truly vine-ripe juicy red wonder picked less than 24 hours ago. Shopping seasonally also lets him vary menu items every couple of weeks. He doesn’t try to coax life out of asparagus in October; instead, he’ll feature winter squash instead – just coming into its peak.

To get his local ingredients, Chef Brandon often visits the farmers’ markets in both Saline and Ann Arbor every day they are open, as well as some individual farms. If this sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is.

“I do enjoy it,” he told me. “I like talking with the producers and hearing what looks good this week and what new things I can expect soon. I used to just dash in, pick up my ingredients, and leave, but it’s getting to the point where it takes me half an hour to pick up a box of produce!” And at least the farmers’ markets are close by and bring a number of local vendors together – otherwise, he’d also be spending endless hours just trying to locate producers of individual items.

Part of our goal at Eat Local Eat Natural is to help ease some of the time investment for chefs like Chef Brandon by researching local meat, egg, and dairy producers, vetting the products for quality and sustainable growing practices, and offering “one-stop shopping” for several locally-produced foodstuffs.

One of the difficulties remains the way we restaurant patrons order meat. Certain cuts are far more popular than others – think filet mignon vs. chuck roast. But there are only so many servings of these preferred cuts per cow or pig, so a restaurant can eat up the entire local supply of, say, tenderloins long before the rest of the meat is used. Chef Brandon gets around this, in part, by finding delicious ways of serving less well-known cuts of meat, such as making his own sausage.

In September, Chef Brandon held a special “100-Mile Dinner” event. Everything but the salt, pepper, and olive oil came from within 100 miles – not a terribly difficult task, he assured me. The event was very well attended, and guests raved about the food. Chef Brandon says the upcoming Harvest Celebration Dinner (Nov. 12, 7pm) will also feature nearly 100% local ingredients. Contact Vinology for reservations, and tell Chef Brandon you love to Eat Local, Eat Natural!

It’s been hard to find good economic news lately: sub-prime mortgage crisis, bank buyouts, Federal bailout, gas shortages, rising food prices. Solutions seem far away and out of our hands.

There is something we can do, however, and it’s a pretty tasty solution: eat more local food!

Eating locally-produced and –prepared food strengthens our local economy in a number of ways. Obviously, it preserves jobs for farmers and restaurant employees. There’s no cut of restaurant profits that goes to a corporate headquarters, so those profits tend to circulate through our community rather than go out-of-state. Eating locally also means fewer of our food dollars go to pay for petroleum, so we’re a little more insulated from changes in fuel prices. 

But here’s another thought. The more we develop our local food economy, the more self-reliant our area can be. Not that we’d ever want to live without coffee and chocolate, oranges and avocados, and corn from Iowa if we have a bad drought here. But wouldn’t it be nice to know that you’d still eat well even if fewer truckloads of California produce trekked across the country?

Eating locally now helps ensure we can continue to eat locally in the future.