Friday, March 30, 2012

Buying Local Isn’t Practical…Yeah Right!

I read an interesting article in the Urbanite today.  I would encourage you to read it (it’s short) and share your thoughts on it. The article is about food. Local food. Two things jumped out at me immediately.

    Spike Gjerde (of Woodberry Kitchen) believes it takes more creativity to come up with a dish based solely on what's available locally than it does to create something around far-flung ingredients. "When you don't have all the colors you want on the plate, you've got to dig a little deeper," he says.

I feel exactly the same way about flowers. I always try to explain to people how UNIQUE our creative process is compared to conventional florists. Conventional florists have every flower in the world available to them at the click of a button. They can “design” on paper exactly what they want, before they ever even see the flowers. For us, we are faced with a new, creative challenge every time we go out to the farms and pick up our flowers.  We get so excited to create beautiful arrangements based on exactly what is available on any given day. That may mean we use basil or rosemary for our foliage or we may use peaches for a splash of peach in a centerpiece. Our arrangements perfectly reflect the season and the locale where they were grown.

Photos by Love Struck Images

The second thing that struck me-and I hear things like this all the time.

An anonymous local caterer claimed that it's just not possible or practical for everyone to be 100 percent local. "Some restaurants can do it, but catering companies really can't," he says. "The menu would be limited ... and it would be too expensive. ... Woodberry, though, has the clientele that will pay for it."

People are always saying that it doesn’t make sense to run an entire business using local flowers or that you can’t do all of your wedding/event flowers with local flowers. Of course you can! Not only can you-you should! Florists should be buying more locally and more people should be choosing local for their events. Sure, you may not be able to have exactly the flowers that you see in Martha Stewart. But you can have the same look and the same feel using flowers that were grown close to home, are seasonally appropriate and look equally-if not MORE beautiful! You can even meet the farmers that grew them and visit the farms where they were grown. How cool is that?

Photo by Jocelyn Mathewes

Finally, I want to give a shout out to all the caterers that we work with that incorporating local elements into their work: Patchwork Catering, Eat and Smile Foods, Dionysus Kitchen, Zia’s, Azafran and more! Keep on Keepin’ on friends. You make me proud!

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