Taste test

PALMER -- At 71, Art Carney is old enough to remember "boat eggs," the term people used to describe eggs that had been shipped to Alaska. By the time the boat reached the dock in Anchorage, the eggs were so old the yolk ran as soon as the egg was cracked, he said. In fresh eggs, the yolk stays firm.

Carney, who lives in Wasilla, grew up at a time when eating local was not a choice but a requirement. Most people ate local simply because that was the only option, he said.

That's changed in the last 60 years as a combination of factors -- from the invention of efficient refrigerated trucks to falling oil prices and technology to control the ripening of produce -- have allowed producers to ship everything from milk to bananas for thousands of miles without spoiling.

Today there's no doubt that probably 95 percent or more of the food eaten in Alaska is imported, said Hans Geier, an economist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks' School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences.

Many argue those advances have given us more and better choices, such as strawberries in February. But those who advocate eating more locally produced food say those choices have come with costs, including fewer family farms because of a concentration in food production nationwide and the loss of knowledge about how to raise food. On a more aesthetic level, they say, most shipped food doesn't taste as good as local fare.

Steve Glos, a construction worker who raises beef cattle at his home in Wasilla, said he can barely find words to describe how much better his meat tastes.

"You just look up some adjectives and throw it on there," he said. "I wouldn't know how to describe what a tremendous difference it is. Mine has real meat flavor and texture, not just texture with flavor and coloring."

Anne Corrine-Kell, who raises chickens and cultivates a garden at her home near Palmer, feels the same. Her eggs taste better, even than the organic ones in the store, she said, and nothing compares to eating freshly picked produce.

"Everything up here (in the store ) is a week or two old," she said "When I go in the garden and pick lettuce and eat it, it's still alive almost."

From the outset of our experiment to eat local, we wondered if we would notice a difference in taste from our usual store-bought fare.

There were seeming high points. A scrambled egg breakfast made with local eggs, tomatoes, goat milk and chopped pieces of garlic whistle -- the part that grows above the garlic bulb -- was sublime. And the raw cow's milk really did taste sweeter, standing out in a blind taste test from the organic whole milk we usually buy.

But did the food really taste better or did we just think it did? In other words, did those eggs taste so good because they were fresh? Or because we took the time to cook them and appreciated them more?

Our final day's dinner was designed to try to ferret out the truth.

We planned an all-local feast that included salad with freshly picked tomatoes from our greenhouse, fresh mozzarella from Windsong Farms, a rhubarb pie made with rhubarb from our garden and freshly steamed broccoli and squash from Arctic Organics.

For the centerpiece, we had two whole chickens: one a store-bought bird and the other a local free-range bird.

To be as fair as possible, we made the chickens as alike as possible. Both weighed 4 pounds. Both went in the oven at the same time, side by side in the same pan. And both came out at the same time.

Even before they went in the oven, my husband said the store-bought bird "felt floppier." But only he knew which bird was which.

The rest of us -- six guests, who included my husband's parents, a fellow reporter and her three children, and I -- were clueless.

I remember thinking the store bird might be a little saltier since they inject the chickens with a brine. But I certainly didn't think it would be easy to tell the difference.

I was wrong.

Right off, 10-year-old Luke announced the chicken on the purple plate, which was the local bird, tasted "more real." His 6-year-old sister Grace agreed and others quickly chimed in. The meat on the purple plate had "better texture, more flavor." The chicken on the blue plate, meanwhile, was deemed mushy.

There was no question. The local chicken didn't so much taste different as have a firmer texture. The store bird turned to mush after a few bites, the way cereal does when it's left too long in milk.

Still the key question was whether the local bird tasted three times better since it was three times more expensive. That was harder to answer.

EPILOGUE

Like any diet, the first days of going all local were the toughest. Being able to grab a bagel or a handful of raisins would have been nice some days. But it wasn't too hard to get into a routine of planning ahead for meals, and it would likely get easier with practice.

Surprisingly, we found living on an all-local diet cheaper than we expected because it forced us to cook meals instead of buy more expensive processed food. (See A typical day's grocery list.)

We also found ourselves sitting around a table more -- something local food advocates tout as a bonus of reconnecting people through food.

I also managed somehow to lose 2 pounds despite drinking whole milk and eating cheese curds that run nearly 900 calories per half-pound bag.

We also faced our own mini-dilemmas. Could we, for example, eat Matanuska Thunder potato chips? The chips are made from Alaska potatoes, but the salt and oil and even the specially made double-layer bags are imported.

Others in similar situations had made impressive sacrifices.

Alisa Smith, a Canadian woman who with her husband ate only food within a 100 miles of their home for a year, went so far as to make sandwiches with turnip slices when they couldn't find wheat to make bread. We, however, let our stomachs do the talking. We ate the chips.

The biggest downside by far was in time.

Buying local meant having to drive to several different producers and making meals. Instead of buying a prepackaged $5 sandwiches for lunch from the grocery store, we had to think ahead, packing up a hardboiled egg or throwing together a salad with tomatoes from our garden.

Still most of the problems we did encounter were more from our own lack of imagination and energy. A few items like a bunch of Swiss chard went bad waiting for us to turn them into a meal.

In the weeks since our eating local week, we've lapsed into our old ways more out of convenience and bad habit than anything else.

Still, a month later we have yet to go back to a store-bought chicken. We're also committed to local eggs as much for the taste and the good feeling of supporting our neighbor's 9-year-old son, who raises the chickens.

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Daily News reporter S.J. Komarnistky can be reached at skomarnitsky@adn.com. Daily News photographer Stephen Nowers can be reached at snowers@adn.com.