My Food Experience

Unfortunately I was unable to make it to class Monday due to a family emergency. Over the weekend, however, I had the luxury of attending a local crawfish festival in my hometown (Buras, LA). The festival is made up of approximately 30 booths that have a boil off competition, in which the best tasting crawfish win. The cost to enter the festival was $10 all you can eat, although I found out from one boiler that the true cost of the crawfish was around $2.50 per lb. I was also told that the crawfish were either bought from local fishermen (from Plaquemines Parish to around Baton Rouge) or from local seafood distributors 20-60 miles from the area. Here in Plaquemines Parish, it is part of a culture to eat the array of local seafood, crawfish, crabs, shrimp, and oysters. The people at the festival, especially the cooks, took pride in the fact that the food they cooked all day for the visitors to eat was part of a long time tradition, and wasn’t just some “junk” food from somewhere far away. Here I was able to sense a value and connection to the food we ate. The connection was evident; the entire animal is in front of you and you practically have to dismember it to get to the meat (maybe a little graphic, but true). A lot of people are revolted by crawfish because they “look creepy,” but don’t think twice about eating crawfish tails in a restaurant where they have no idea where they came from.

That weekend I also ate at a locally owned restaurant called Delta Marina Grill. This restaurant is very small, and has quite a homey feel to it, sort of like a mom and pop diner. The menu mostly has hamburger shop or diner food like hamburgers, fries, fried or grilled seafood, sandwiches, and oysters. I was told by the restaurant manager that the hamburgers are made with 100% real beef and are not pre-frozen. The ground meat for hamburgers was bought from Doerle Food Services, a food distributor from Broussard, LA, while the steak and bread were bought from Fremin’s Grocery, a local grocery store 20 miles north. The oysters and seafood were also bought from local fishermen or local seafood distributors. The price of a hamburger meal with fries was $7.75. Although there seemed to be an effort to buy locally and keep business within the community, I still wondered about things like where did Doerle get their meat from, where did Fremin’s buy their steaks from, was it from organic or non-organic farmers? Here there still seamed to be a separation from the food that was being eaten and the person eating it, unlike the experience at the crawfish festival.

The last place I visited was Whole Foods on Magazine Street. Whole Foods has a very green, organic, and relaxed feel to it. This environment sucks you in and gives you the impression that everything sold here is local and sustainable, but I quickly found out that wasn’t true. While there I bought a brand of goat cheese named Cypress Grove, assuming it was from somewhere in southern Louisiana. When I made it home and checked the label, I found that this cheese was actually made in California, which made me realize that you cannot believe everything you see. I don’t mean that Whole Foods is a bad thing; it is much better than buying food that supports industrial farming. What I do mean is that even reputable brands like Whole Foods can give off a façade of local products. Here again, I realized that there was a large separation between the goat cheese I was eating and myself. Unfortunately, by completing this small assignment, the separation between food and consumer seems to be the normal for the American food culture.