Welcome to Utah Food Coalition's Newsletter
And our first conversation with SLC Top Crops, Yoko Ramen and Arlo Restaurant about why sourcing local food not only supports farms in the present, but Utah's future of eating.
This is a newsletter by the Utah Food Coalition. Here we hope to connect Utahns with Utah’s food—and the people who grow it, the people who make delicious things out of it and the people who are working for us to be able to eat it. In a complex local food landscape of farms and markets, commerce and legislation, locally grown produce and imported products, we want to make it easier for every Utahn to know where their food is coming from, and to bolster a system where our food is grown in our communities, for our communities.
Most of us don’t know where our food is coming from—even if it’s actually from nearby. For example, the steaming bowls of ramen at Yoko Ramen. While it’s not exactly a secret that the extremely popular yet casual little ramen shop sources many of their vegetables and sometimes their meats from local producers, they’re also probably not the first place that comes to mind when one thinks of a “farm-to-table” restaurant—especially because the price points are accessible enough to pack the room each night they’re open. But sourcing locally is part of what makes Yoko’s delicious menu so delicious, at least according to Chef Devon Auchterlonie.
“Local food tastes better, makes me feel good, helps the farmers and you don’t have to do a lot to it,” he explains. “It makes my job easier. I don’t have to do a lot to make something that tastes bad taste good,” he says. As for keeping the accessible price-point, he says that they do it despite making less money than they could. Auchterlonie also says that ordering from local farmers makes him more excited about the actual process of ordering food for the restaurant, despite the fact that it is harder to find and work with local farmers than it is to just order from large food distributors like Nicholas. Among several small farms he’s worked with at Yoko, there’s Top Crops, run by Amanda Theobald and Elliott Musgrove.
“It is a challenge to source, [but] seeing Amanda and Elliott come in, maybe helping them run their business makes me happy and makes me motivated to come to work.” In the winter, it gets harder to go “full farm,” because farms take a break during the cold Utah winter or pull back on production, and Auchterlonie says he doesn’t have the time to hunt for more active farms during the frosty, plant hostile months—so Nicholas gets that business instead. In the good season though, Auchterlonie works with many local farms, including Keep It Real Vegetables, BUG Farms, Pomona Produce, and The Green Urban Lunch Box.
And farmers do need those connections. For Theobald and Musgrove of Top Crops, their customers and consistent relationships with businesses like Yoko Ramen have given them the vital support they need in a profession that, each year, tests their ability to continue. “At the end of every farm season it feels impossible to do it again but then when winter comes it feels impossible to not do it again,” Theobald says.“And I think that one of the worst things about farming is that it’s miserable when you’re doing it, but it’s such great work at the same time,” she continues. “It becomes so much more than a job, it becomes like a lifestyle—which is also one other bad thing about it. It’s very nice to just be able to leave work at work, and you can’t really do that with farming. There are just times where it feels like, ‘I don't know if I can do this again,’ at least on our scale, without employees. We harvest a lot, and that’s the part that’s hard about it, is the actual labor of harvesting—that’s why there have always been migrant workers and slavery and there still is.”
She also notes that it’s hard to live a life so fused with work while watching the people who buy their vegetables enjoying relatively normal lives, complete with weekends and vacations. “It just makes it harder to live this tiny insular life of poverty, of body aches and hard work while everyone—or it feels like everyone else—gets to live this modern life of comfort and leisure.”
Top Crops doesn’t have employees and doesn't take volunteers, so the only real help they’ve accessed over the years have been some grants from Slow Food Utah, the Urban Food Connection of Utah, plus one from the Coronavirus Food Assistant Program. Still, Theobald expresses exasperation towards not having more consistent access to aid, the way bigger farms do with their subsidies. Small farms like theirs that grow food may not receive aid basically because it’s not the kind of agriculture Utah sees as profitable—because Utah prizes its alfalfa exports. “[There’s] this mindset that this is the best use of the land, this is what you can get out of it, but it’s also an easier crop to grow. Market gardening and vegetable farming is the hardest,” Theobald explains.
Theobald says to succeed, farms need a bigger team to work with, and land that they own and can make infrastructural improvements on—things Top Crops doesn’t have now but hope to one day, despite the fact that Utah does not protect agricultural land from development, which makes it harder to find land to grow on. Top Crops is not the only farm facing these problems, and Theobald notes that with Salt Lake lacking resources like food co-ops and permanent, year-round markets found in other big cities, it’s getting harder for farmers to stay afloat.
“It just feels like Salt Lake is shrinking in that way,” she says. “I’m sure that there will be more farms that start, but it doesn’t feel like anyone is permanent, because of land pricing pressure, burnout, so many things.” Yoko sources from some of the same farms as Top Crops’ other client, Arlo, and Arlo’s owner Milo Carrier has seen for himself some loss of farms lately. Carrier sources locally for many of the same reasons that Auchterlonie does—including higher quality compared to produce that’s trucked long distances and often picked before it’s ripe. Fresh, local produce and meat not only contribute to the quality of Arlo’s fine dining dishes, but to Carrier’s vision for a sustainable business. But finding those products also comes with the same challenges Auchterlonie spoke of, mainly that sourcing locally requires flexibility and critical thinking when you’re dealing with ingredients that shift from week to week.
Not all businesses, Carrier admits, find it practical to source locally. But as we’re seeing in a world disrupted by supply chain issues and climate change, there may come a time when imported, commercial food is no longer a realistic option—and our small local producers may not be around to feed us. For all the reasons Theobald cited above and probably more that are specific to each farm, Carrier has noticed a grim trend: “In the two years that I’ve been doing this I’ve already seen more than half the people I work with close up their operation.” Those that have folded include producers like Pomona Produce and Hand Sown Homegrown, the latter of which was selling for thirteen years.
“Maybe it’s dramatic, but I really do believe that people need to start adopting that practice, because at a certain point—probably in our lifetime or the lifetime of a restaurant—you’re not going to have that option anymore,” Carrier says of the reliance businesses have on large commercial food distributors. “There's going to be a point where conditions make it no longer viable to produce food in the way that we do and you’re going to have to start sourcing more from local producers—and without the support now they’re not going to be around.”
Essentially, something’s gotta give at some point in Utah’s food system—so we should lean into a more sustainable future before it’s not an option anymore. Find out how we can all start to lean in to that future, together, and learn with us here at Utah Food Coalition. We’re just getting started!
Elliott Musgrove and the greens at SLC Top Crops. Photo courtesy of SLC Top Crops.
Notes:
Devon Auchterlonie says: “If you're a local farm, come talk to me and let me buy stuff and I can send you to different people that would buy from you.” He also recommends visiting Central 9th Market (161 W. 900 South, Salt Lake City), where you can find all sorts of locally-sourced produce mixed in with tasty market goods and a lineup of deli sandwiches, pizzas and homemade focaccia bread.
You can keep up with Top Crops @slctopcrops on Instagram, where they spent last summer forgoing the usual market hustle for an online ordering system all their own, accessible through Instagram.
Find the other farms we’ve mentioned in this piece at @bugfarms, @pomona_produce, @handsownhomegrown, @thegreenurbanlunchbox and @keepitrealvegetables on Instagram.
Visit Yoko Ramen at 473 E. 300 South in Salt Lake City, and don’t skip their veggie gyozas. Find their menu here.
Go up the hill in Marmalade to visit Arlo for a special night out, at 271 N. Center Street in Salt Lake City. Make reservations here.
Chowed-upon veggie ramen at Yoko Ramen featuring seasonal winter veg.
Follow our (so-far) monthly newsletter where we’ll be sharing local food system stories like this, and other resources for connecting to Utah’s food community.