I’m here to say this morning that Andrew Zimmern, the crazy, will eat anything guy from the TV program Bizarre Foods is a unsung hero of Local Food. And while we’re at it…Anthony Bourdain the tough talking NY guy from TV Travel Channel’s “No Reservations” likewise encourages Local Food…even if the locality is Corsica or Tokyo. What? Huh? Yes they do show and eat local foods. And they can set a standard for us in greater Newburyport. Watch these two programs and see if you don’t start thinking “we can do that better here!!”

A quick example is escargot. Zimmern goes to France and samples the snails, looks at recipes, and discovers a local grower of snails. Well we learn that snails have the texture and taste of mild mussels and the sauce they are cooked with. Garlic butter escargot taste very much like mussels done the same way. Moreover we learn that growing them indoors commercially is an easy, clean and low cost way to produce protein in your town, any town, Newburyport. In a building the size of Alden Merrill, there could be a snail farm that grows for the Boston market and local consumption.

Another example; Bourdain visits his wife’s family on Corsica of the Italian coast. We learn that household cooks pick wild fennel, dandelion, and lots of other wild salad greens and herbs while walking the kids to the neighborhood school. They go home to cook rabbit from their back yard pen. They are on an island and they use all of nature’s products. All of it sounds familiar to us, its just that we’ve been disconnected from local natural foods by the industrialized food paradigm. Here’s a proposal. Let’s check out some of these odd ways others forage, grow and catch their local foods and then do some  of it ourselves.