Event spotlights state’s bounty Maine Fare draws crowd to Camden

CAMDEN – Lorrie Marx-Adams is a home cook. Although her four children have all left the nest, she prides herself on having fed them fresh food prepared in her own kitchen. But just because the kids are gone, her appetite for good food has not flagged.

“I try to use local,” said Marx-Adams, who lives in Hollis. “And I dream of cooking entirely organic. I like that food from Maine is fresh, and that buying it is supporting the local economy. It’s what I love about Maine and living along the coast.”

Marx-Adams, a social worker, and her husband Peter Marx, a post office employee, were among about 1,000 attendees at Maine Fare, a two-and-a-half day event last weekend in Camden featuring the state’s diverse offerings of food and its food producers, processors and advocates. Held at the Knox Mill Center and various locations throughout town, the event was part conference, part farmers market, part marketplace and part smorgasbord, with more than three dozen booths of exhibitors showing and selling Maine-made and Maine-grown wares. The lineup included fresh vegetables, fruits and meat, as well as jams, chocolate sauces, condiments, sea salt, pizza, wine, beer, mushrooms, candy, bread, cheese, and yes, lobster and blueberries.

And while lobster and blueberries are vital to Maine’s economy and identity, the purpose of the weekend was to encourage consumers, restaurateurs and market owners to expand their thinking about food produced in Maine to include a new wave of food produced in the state.

“You’ve heard that eating local is the new organic,” said Leslie Land, a cookbook author, garden columnist for the New York Times and longtime resident of Cushing. “But that’s too limited. Eating local is really the new ‘mom and apple pie.'”

Land moderated “Eating Local in the North: Keeping It Delicious and Close to Home,” a panel discussion that emphasized the role consumers and food workers and educators play in supporting growers and the economy. Most consumers on tight budgets tend to shop in commercial discount markets, panelists acknowledged, but quickly added that the time has come for all eaters to reconsider shopping habits and priorities.

Maine produces only 20 percent of the food it consumes, and ingredients for the average meal travel up to 1,900 miles from field to fork, according to a recent report by the Maine Department of Agriculture. Food advocates said that figure should be higher, as much as 80 percent, and they hoped that Maine Fare would spread the news that Maine farmers, fishermen, food artisans and chefs are increasingly making that possible throughout the year.

A second panel discussion “The Sea Around Us: A Limited Bounty?” gathered spokespeople from the fishing industry to present and discuss the challenges fishermen face in the state. Members of the two panels advocated food awareness as a benefit to personal, civic and economic health.

“People don’t realize how much opportunity there is in Maine,” said Dee Dee Caldwell, a third-generation manager at Caldwell Farms, an organic beef producer in Turner. “Buying one or two packages of ground beef from me a week would make an impact on my farm.”

Land put it another way. “Baby steps count,” she said. “If what you can afford is hamburger, get the hamburger. If you want to splurge for steak, fine. It’s as though you’re making a donation to a nature conservancy, but instead of getting a tote bag, you’re getting something good to eat.”

Farming and fishing industries employ about 45,000 workers in the state and add $1.2 billion to the economy annually. Mainers spend $3 billion a year on food products and services. But farmers and fishermen receive less than 4 percent of that output each year.

Maine Fare adds an important voice to that discussion, said Jim Cook, director of Madawaska’s Crown O’ Maine Organic Cooperative, a wholesale distributor of winter staples.

“It increases the awareness of choices and availability and makes people look at their own thinking processes,” said Cook. “It’s a political issue, too. We need to change our society, and we need to change our country, and I think it begins with food. We need to help others get out of the big-box mentality.”

Cook was one of many in this food-centric crowd who spoke about threats of food contamination, preparation for emergencies and the state’s dietary health crises. Yet while the weekend’s discussions often focused on serious issues such as economy, diet and recent news of E. coli-tainted spinach in stores, the overall mood was celebratory. Participants, who paid from $10 to $80 for tickets, attended cooking demonstrations, ate blueberry pancakes with Maine maple syrup at a church breakfast, purchased food at the marketplace, and listened to presentations by nationally acclaimed food writers Molly O’Neill and Barbara Damrosch and chefs Sam Hayward of Fore Street in Portland and Rich Hanson of Cleonice in Ellsworth.

Maine Fare collaborated with the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association for an opening tasting and MOFGA fundraiser on Friday at the Camden Yacht Club. The harborside event featured wines from Bartlett Winery in Gouldsboro and Cellardoor Winery in Lincolnville, cocktails with vodka from Cold River Vodka, a distillery in Freeport, and Bog Juice, a cranberry juice made by Pat and Mike’s Garden in Ellsworth. More than 200 participants also sampled cheese from the Maine Cheese Guild, corn soup with chanterelle mushrooms, assorted greens, fresh bread, pork chile verde, rabbit stew and desserts developed by chefs around the state.

“I love seeing all these Maine cheeses in one place,” said Jennifer Betancourt of Silvery Moon Creamery in Westbrook. She was one of a handful of farmers who mingled with Camden’s yacht club crowd, tourists and others for the tasting. “I grew up in Edgecomb and always wanted to find a way to work with goats.”

Instead she works with cows. She founded her own business after developing cheese-making recipes in her home kitchen using fresh milk from Smiling Hill Farm, also in Westbrook. Now she makes 20,000 pounds of hand-salted, hand-stirred cheeses a year.

“The bottom line is: Let’s grow it here,” said first lady Karen Baldacci, who attended the tasting with Blaine House chef Heather Hopkins. “When we look at the creative economy and business, the food scene is definitely vibrant and growing in Maine.”

Russell Libby, executive director of MOFGA, praised Baldacci, the honorary chair of Maine Fare, for her dedication to food issues in the state. “She lives it,” he said. “We couldn’t ask for a better supporter.” To which the first lady responded: “You and I together working with the governor can get this state where it needs to be.”

This is the third year MOFGA has held a fundraiser with food made 100 percent from Maine’s organic bounty, but the first year it has occurred someplace other than a farm. Organic certification was imperative to the menu that night – right down to the tasty salad dressings which David Grant, chef at Aubergine Bistro and Wine Bar in Portland, made without olive oil because olives are not a Maine crop. The tasting was one of the only exclusively organic segments of the weekend.

Many credited the success of Maine Fare to internationally known food writer and Camden native Nancy Harmon Jenkins, who sparked the idea for the convening and then worked with local organizers to bring speakers and producers from throughout the state and region.

“I think everybody had something wonderful to eat and something wonderful to drink, and that’s what this is all about,” said Jenkins at the Friday tasting. “We have everything we need to put this thing on the map for Maine.”

Jenkins, who chaired the event, noted along with others that most of the participants in the weekend’s discussions and offerings were already knowledgeable about the necessity of supporting local industry. Next year, they hope to attract more participants from a greater variety of backgrounds. They also hope that the Maine Fare Web site will become a network of food resources.

Lorrie Marx-Adams, the home cook from Hollis, fully intends to be at the event next September. Surely by then, she will need to restock her supplies of raspberry and “bumbleberry” jams made by Fieldstone Farms in Bangor.

Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8286 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.