Chef Andrea Reusing: Farm-to-Table Passion

But for Lantern’s James Beard Award–winning chef, vision­ary and cofounder, Andrea Reusing, her work is sim­ply an exten­sion of her con­tin­u­ing pas­sion for the rich fla­vors found in local, sus­tain­ably pro­duced ingredients.

“The uti­liza­tion of local ingre­di­ents brings me more fla­vor, in a lot of ways, than any­one who’s using ingre­di­ents from all over the place,” Chef Reusing told Organic Connections. “It pro­vides me as well with a nat­ural restric­tion from which to draw ideas to assem­ble the menu. When you can pull any pos­si­ble ingre­di­ent from any place in the world at any time, it’s almost too much free­dom. I find sourc­ing locally really focuses the cook­ing, and it focuses deci­sion mak­ing. And I love that challenge.”

Reusing’s choice of career began at an early age. “Cooking for me stemmed from just lov­ing to eat and being hun­gry all the time,” she recalled. “I wanted to be able to pre­pare things that I had eaten in dif­fer­ent places and was try­ing to dupli­cate foods that I’d had in restau­rants and people’s houses. That’s how I started cook­ing when I was a teenager.”

Not sur­pris­ingly, her love of local, fresh pro­duce also began when Reusing was young. “My mother and father were both raised in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, so I grew up going to farms with my grand­par­ents and my par­ents,” she con­tin­ued. “My grand­par­ents lived in a very rural area, so I didn’t really ever see cook­ing sea­son­ally as dif­fer­ent, or cook­ing with ingre­di­ents that grew in your gar­den or grew nearby as some­thing that was unusual.”

It would be in the pro­fes­sional stage of her life that these two com­ple­men­tary ele­ments would merge and come into play.

The Local Establishment

Upon com­ple­tion of col­lege, Reusing was liv­ing in New York City, work­ing as a pub­lic pol­icy con­sul­tant. It was there she met her future hus­band, who lived and had a busi­ness in North Carolina. Deciding she was ready for a change away from the hus­tle of New York, Reusing moved with him to North Carolina, where she encoun­tered some­what of a cul­ture shock. “Things are a lit­tle bit slower, and I was a lit­tle bit anx­ious,” she said, laugh­ing. “It took me a cou­ple years to adjust, but once I did, this really felt like home. I’ve now been here 17 years.”

Sometime after her move, Reusing com­menced her career as a pro­fes­sional chef. In 2002 she and her brother, Brendan, decided to open an Asian restau­rant in the city of Chapel Hill, a his­tor­i­cally pro­gres­sive uni­ver­sity town. Initially they didn’t con­cen­trate on locally sourc­ing their pro­duce and meats. “I had the idea to open a restau­rant that was going to be finan­cially suc­cess­ful, and not go out of busi­ness,” she recounted. “There were only a few Asian restau­rants here at the time. When we first opened, I would say that the per­cent­age of local we used was much less than it is now. The main focus was just try­ing to get open and sur­vive day to day.”

But in North Carolina, Reusing had dis­cov­ered a flour­ish­ing local food scene. “This is one of the older farmer-run farm­ers’ mar­ket areas in the coun­try, so there was already a very thriv­ing com­mu­nity of farms and restau­rants when I arrived. I wasn’t cook­ing pro­fes­sion­ally in New York, but I shopped at dif­fer­ent farm­ers’ mar­kets there. The ingre­di­ents I found here were, in many ways, a lot better.”

It wasn’t long before she began broad­en­ing her local sourc­ing, and this finally became the method through which she obtained the major­ity of her ingre­di­ents. “We knew tons of farm­ers just from being in the com­mu­nity and going to farm­ers’ mar­kets,” said Reusing. “There are about 300 small farms within 25 or 30 min­utes of here. So there was no chal­lenge in find­ing them; the chal­lenge became orga­niz­ing the menu so as to allow us to use as much of their meat and pro­duce as possible.”

That orga­niz­ing process resulted in a menu planned around local ingre­di­ents sea­son­ally avail­able. “For the most part, avail­abil­ity deter­mines the menu,” Reusing pointed out. “We have a cou­ple things that are on the menu year-round, like a tea-and-spice smoked chicken. On that, we change the ingre­di­ents that are in the rice with it, as well as the veg­eta­bles that go along with it, through­out the course of the year. We start off in early spring with aspara­gus; then we do sugar snap peas; next we do some sort of early spring brais­ing mix; then we go into green beans, and then broad beans. It kind of fol­lows the year that way.

“In the win­ter it’s usu­ally just brais­ing greens, which is a mix of mus­tard greens and kale; but we’re really lucky that we have the kind of cli­mate here where peo­ple can grow a lot even in January and February.”

Reusing pays close atten­tion to the ways that crops are grown and the meth­ods by which ani­mals are raised—and she has seen the results in the taste. “I’ve noticed that peo­ple who care about what they are grow­ing have food that’s a lot more fla­vor­ful,” she said.

Cooking in the Moment

Reusing’s art has not been lim­ited to cre­at­ing and oper­at­ing an award-winning restau­rant; in 2011 she pub­lished a cook­book enti­tled Cooking in the Moment: A Year of Seasonal Recipes. As the title implies, the book takes the reader/cook through a year of meals cre­ated around sea­son­ally avail­able ingredients—over 130 recipes in all—supported by text and pho­tographs that help cel­e­brate each season.

Her rea­sons for cre­at­ing the book were quite spe­cific. “I was con­stantly hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple who told me that they wanted to be able to cook din­ner after going to the farm­ers’ mar­ket,” Reusing related. “They didn’t want to have to stop off at the gro­cery store, but they felt intim­i­dated or they felt that it was too chal­leng­ing to only go to the farm­ers’ mar­ket to make a meal or two. I real­ized the oppo­site was true of me—I ended up cook­ing that way most of the time, more out of lazi­ness, really, and not fol­low­ing recipes. I was just try­ing to use up what I had in the CSA box, or what I had brought home from the restau­rant, or what I had grabbed at the farm­ers’ mar­ket. So it actu­ally started as me writ­ing down very sim­ple basic recipes for friends.”

Click any image to enlarge.

Reusing envi­sions the book as a con­fi­dence builder for home cooks. “What I hope that it can do for peo­ple is be use­ful, help get din­ner on the table quickly, and also demon­strate that food doesn’t have to be com­pli­cated to taste really good,” she explained. “There’s been this kind of ‘foodie-ism’ that has crept into the way we think about food and the way we think about cook­ing in our own homes. In the last 10 years it seems as if there’s been a trend for peo­ple who are not in the food busi­ness to feel like there needs to be some sort of spe­cial train­ing to just have peo­ple over for din­ner, or to even cook for your own fam­ily. I hope the book helps counter this idea and encour­ages peo­ple to believe that the ulti­mate short­cut in cook­ing is to use really good high-quality ingredients.”

Passion beyond the Kitchen

Taking her enthu­si­asm for local agri­cul­ture far out­side her restau­rant, Reusing is on the board of advi­sors for the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS), a joint effort between two of North Carolina’s lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties and its Department of Agriculture. Since 1994 CEFS has been heav­ily research­ing and pro­mot­ing organic, sus­tain­able and local agri­cul­ture, and today its impact is being felt statewide and is set­ting a remark­able exam­ple for many other states in the nation.

“I believe the work that CEFS does is vitally impor­tant to the future of North Carolina agri­cul­ture,” Reusing said. “We’re an agri­cul­tural state, yet prob­a­bly well less than 5 per­cent of what we eat is grown here. Their approach—to try to help North Carolina feed itself—is impor­tant from many stand­points: food secu­rity, com­mu­nity and the envi­ron­ment. But there is some­thing that’s way more intan­gi­ble, and that’s the qual­ity of all of our lives, includ­ing health­care and our con­nec­tion to each other.”

Reusing sees local and sus­tain­able food sys­tems as our only hope for long-term sur­vival. “The answer to how local food sys­tems could fix the over­all food sys­tem is complicated—but I guess the short answer is it’s the only way to fix the food sys­tem,” she said. “If the food sys­tem is get­ting big­ger and more con­sol­i­dated, and fewer and fewer farms are pro­duc­ing more and more of our food, it’s a very brit­tle sys­tem. What we need is more resilience in terms of eco­nomic mod­els, to feed com­mu­nity and eco­nomic devel­op­ment, and more resilience in terms of defend­ing our­selves from future cli­mate change. We also need more resilience to super­bugs; many author­i­ties, includ­ing the CDC, fear that we’re approach­ing what they call a ‘post-antibiotic era’ because of super­bugs, due to the overuse and mis­use of antibi­otics in fac­tory farms. Community food sys­tems can address our abil­ity to pro­duce farm ani­mals with­out using antibiotics.”

In addi­tion, Reusing is a mem­ber of Chefs Collaborative, a national chef net­work that is work­ing to expand the sus­tain­able food land­scape through chef con­nec­tions, edu­ca­tion and respon­si­ble buy­ing deci­sions. “Chefs Collaborative is an orga­ni­za­tion that tries to fos­ter net­works of chefs work­ing toward sus­tain­abil­ity and allows them to sup­port each other in this effort,” Reusing said. “One thing we’re focus­ing on right now is an ini­tia­tive about sus­tain­able meat pro­duc­tion, and look­ing at how chefs can help each other elim­i­nate bar­ri­ers to local and regional pasture-based meat sourc­ing in their own kitchens.”

But it all relates back to Reusing’s first love—and prob­a­bly always will. “I love trans­form­ing ingre­di­ents into sur­pris­ing things that peo­ple have never expe­ri­enced before,” she con­cluded. “I love the cama­raderie that comes from work­ing in a kitchen in very close quar­ters. I love the long-term friend­ships that cook­ing has allowed me to estab­lish with peo­ple over the years.”

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit www.andreareusing.com.

Chef Andrea Reusing’s book Cooking in the Moment is avail­able from the Organic Connections book­store.

Photographs reprinted from Cooking in the Moment: A Year of Seasonal Recipes, copy­right © 2011 by Andrea Reusing. Photographs copy­right © 2011 by John Kernick. Published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, a divi­sion of Random House, Inc.