I grew up with a deeply founded distaste for milk. I don’t drink the stuff, I don’t really even like to put it on cereal. Milk and I are not friends. So tell me then, why do I love this ambrosial liquid from Ronnybrook Farm and Dairy in Ancramdale, New York that I am currently sipping? It could be the aesthetically pleasing glass bottle that calls to mind a simpler, more wholesome time when your milk arrived each morning on your doorstep. Or maybe it’s Ronald Osofsky’s poignant plea on the bottle’s back, asking each of us to support his family farm. These are important characteristics, mind. They make you notice the bottle in the dairy case, surrounded by so many other very basic variations on the same theme: milk. But the point here is not aesthetics or emotions, it is taste. This milk tastes gently of sweet cream and clean clover and has this incredible mouthfeel that overwhelms you for a second with surprise. In comparison, Stop ‘N’ Shop’s variation on this theme is empty. It lies flat in the mouth, and echoes of cardboard and chemicals. Even the smell is bland. The taste experience is so underwhelming and I am reminded once again of why I so intensely dislike milk.

Milk is just one example of this incredible difference in taste. I come from a long line of farmers cum gardeners. For most of my life, summer has been filled with bushels upon bushels of garden-fresh tomatoes that taste, in my mind, like pure sunshine encased in the most beautiful red skin. I hate buying tomatoes in the supermarket; even though the bright red color is there, the taste is always much more akin to water than anything else and I’m always disappointed.

Under the glaring Sahelian sun, in the poorest country on the African continent, I was introduced to the taste of truly free-range, grass-fed livestock. I remember the first roasted chicken I devoured in the crossroads town of Bongor in Southern Chad. It was unlike anything I’d ever tasted before. It tasted a little gamey, without being overwhelming. It tasted vibrant, alive. It tasted. Chicken in America, even the corn-fed, free-range product, is so bland. Meat in general is bland. It lacks spirit here. Time and time again, my senses were reawakened in that deserted desert of a place. Lettuce, cucumbers, onions, pork, beef. Everything I probably shouldn’t have eaten because of the parasites, but everything I did eat because of the flavor. It took a poverty-stricken, third-world country to re-teach me how to taste and taste I did.

There is something to be said for the technology that allows us to buy a pineapple in the middle of a deep Massachusetts winter. That same technology has allowed us to send men to the moon and bypass the unpredictability of nature: droughts, floods and blights. But that shipped and handled pineapple can never compare to the sun-drenched richness of taste of one you pull from the field in Hawaii yourself. It’s in a wholly different ballpark.
            Should local matter? If you care about taste, then absolutely. But in the reality of this work and, indeed, this life, we know it’s not always about getting the best ingredients, sometimes it has to be about cost. Ronnybrook’s delicious milk is, in fact, twice as expensive as Stop ‘N’ Shop’s version. Picking a pineapple in Hawaii is out of range for many in this country. Even picking a Hudson Valley grown apple over one grown in Washington State can put a dent in one’s wallet. So what’s a person to do? First, support local agriculture. The more money small farms have to work with, the easier it will be for them to lower costs. Give up the tall mochafrappucino that costs more per gallon than gasoline does right now and use that money to buy wholesome foodstuffs from people who care. Second, learn about the politics of farm subsidies that keep local apples more expensive than out-of-state ones and demand that the status quo change. If many voices unite around the same message, that message becomes hard to ignore.

If the industrial-complex that has consumed agriculture does not change, our children may never have any idea of what pure sunshine picked from a vine tastes like. The food on the plates we serve will be vibrantly colored and look beautiful, but taste like nothing, or worse, taste like chemicals. We, at the Culinary Institute of America, are the stewards of taste. We have a moral obligation to ensure the sanctity of the food-taste experience. One of the most important ways we can fulfill this obligation is by supporting local agriculture, caring about terroire and asking questions about sustainability. Food should taste. Local should matter.