Any self-respecting Michael Pollan-subscribing locavore knows that when it comes to supporting local farmers and artisanal food makers, small equals good while big equals bad—even if big is organic.
And this binary formula must hold true if the gargantuan company of the moment is Sysco, the $37 billion food distributor known for trucking frozen foods and canned goods to most fast food restaurants, university cafeterias, and hospitals around this sprawling country—not exactly bastions of fine dining, or places where fresh produce even makes an appearance on menus. (Before he died a few years ago, founder John Baugh, who started the company in 1970, was even known for saying, “Frozen foods taste better than anything I could grow in my garden.”)
But now that many big box companies have jumped on the sustainable, organic bandwagon—Wal-Mart now sells organic produce, and most of the 800 Chipotle outlets in this country get some of their produce from local farms—what’s a card-carrying Locavore to think? (The Charlottesville, VA, Chipotle even sources its pork from Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm in Virginia—heralded by Pollan in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” for being a sustainable, pasture-based farm that's "beyond organic.")
A cynic would say these companies are just capitalizing on a consumer trend—that they’re more keen on making money off of conscientious shoppers who are nevertheless too lazy to sign up for a CSA share (or shop at their local farmers’ market) than they are committed to supporting local food economies.
But would those contrarians be correct in this case? Actually, Sysco, long the epitome of industrial agribusiness, maligned by sustainable-food activists and eaters alike, turns out to be doing a damned good job of nurturing regional and local hubs. Under the leadership of progressive CEO Rick Schnieders, the company now partners with Amish and Mennonite farmers in Kansas; artisanal bakers, coffee roasters, and dairies in Oregon; and hundreds of small New England farmers. Some of our country’s top restaurants now get their produce and other hard-to-source ingredients from Sysco: Daniel in New York and Nobu and Gordon Ramsay’s in Los Angeles, for example. Dan Barber (the chef at Blue Hill Stone Barns, recently featured on Top Chef) is a fan.
In fact, in the April issue of Saveur, writer Indira Sen tracks down Schnieders at the Sysco headquarters to see why Barber recently praised the company (to much controversy, she reports) at the Slow Food conference in San Francisco last fall.
The main reason is the company’s fresh produce division, called FreshPoint, which has 35 or so hubs around the country. The Connecticut division is run by David Yandow, a former farmer himself, who sees no conflict between working for Sysco and supporting regional farmers (who, by the way, he’s worked with for most of his life). When I spoke to Yandow last year, he spoke of the long-term relationships he has with these farmers—he and his brothers sold their 130-year-old company to Sysco in 2005 but still run it pretty much the same way they always have, selling their seasonal produce to New England restaurants, grocery stores, and universities. Only now, Yandow has the resources (thanks to Sysco) to train farmers on good agricultural practices and advise them on what to grow, based on what regional chefs are demanding.
But Sysco is not distributing only locally, of course. It transports food from coast to coast all the time—organic salad greens from California to the East coast, for example, and not just in the winter. And how Green can you be when you’re transporting hundreds of millions of goods around the country every day? Sen, a skeptic herself, confronts Schneiders on this issue. By his calculations, though, Sysco logs less “food miles,” driving 1700 cases of organic greens from California to New York per case, than a farmer who drives eight cases 40 miles to a farmer’s market and back. (Paul Roberts makes a similar case in his Mother Jones cover story this month.)
Schneiders is a pragmatist. If giant food companies like Sysco are here to stay—and they are, because our sprawling country and industrialized food system rely upon their efficient hub-and-spoke networks—why not reform them, imbuing them with at least some of the values of the sustainable-food movement? And what’s wrong with making money while doing the right thing?
Purists may still scoff that Sysco remains the bad guy, that the only way for this country’s food system to change is if everyone (including chefs) buys produce exclusively from our farmers’ markets or via a CSA share. But this is a Romantic notion, one that doesn’t take into account the fact that there are billions of people to feed in this country—most of whom cannot afford to pay $1,000 up-front for a share in a CSA. (Or who don't have a farmer's market in their neighborhood.) At a time when family-run farms need all the business they can get, it may only be through the distribution efforts (regional and national) of giants like Sysco that they can make a living.
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