RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
There was a gathering here in Washington, D.C. last week that had nothing to do with the inauguration or with politics. It was an occasion for matchmaking, although not a romantic kind. Here, farmers got set up with chefs in an effort to put more local food on restaurant tables. NPR's Dan Charles was there.
DAN CHARLES, BYLINE: Here's the scene - a sleek and stylish restaurant and brewery called Bluejacket built inside an old factory. The dining room is framed by tall steel fermentation tanks, and sitting in a booth on one side looking expectant and a little tense are Ashley Heaney and Mark Heaney from Green Acres Family Farm in Gapland, Md. They have a cooler full of eggs with them from their pasture-raised chickens because this is their chance to introduce those eggs to big city chefs who want food from local farms.
ASHLEY HEANEY: When I heard about it, I basically filled out the application right away, and I was very excited about it.
CHARLES: Now that you're here, how are you feeling?
A. HEANEY: A little nervous (laughter).
MARK HEANEY: Kind of out of our element, you know? We're farmers, we're not used to being in large groups of people, kind of used to being out and working by yourself.
A. HEANEY: But I think it's going to be fun.
CHARLES: The matchmaker here is Pamela Hess, founder of the Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture. She calls this annual event speed dating for farmers and chefs, and she's already lined up some of the dates.
PAMELA HESS: We connected folks based on where they're located, what they grow, what they want to buy.
CHARLES: A lot of farmers and chefs want these relationship, she says, but they don't happen naturally. Farmers and chefs generally live in different places, they work on different schedules. And according to the executive chef at Bluejacket, Marcelle Afram, they're often very different people.
MARCELLE AFRAM: We have stereotypes in the industry that the farmer is shy and the chef is ferocious so, you know, some mitigation with a couple of beers might help.
CHARLES: Is there some truth to that?
AFRAM: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, absolutely (laughter).
CHARLES: I meet one farmer, though, who doesn't seem shy at all.
CLEO BRAVER: I'm Cleo Braver from Cottingham Farm. Cleo Braver. You're brave, I'm braver.
CHARLES: Braver grows vegetables and hogs. They aren't just any old hogs.
BRAVER: I happen to have the pinnacle of certified organic pasture-raised, organic vegetable-fed, GMO-free sprout-fed, transitional organic grain-fed, you know, heritage hogs available this week and next week.
CHARLES: I've approached this event with a pretty lighthearted attitude. It must be showing in my questions because they don't sit well with one chef, Spike Gjerde from Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore.
SPIKE GJERDE: I think it's anything but lighthearted. What this is about is confronting some of the most serious aspects of our food system, and what we're trying to solve here I think are some of the ways that our food system is failing us.
CHARLES: Gjerde introduces me to a farmer standing nearby who grows old-style grain and mills it into flower. It's spectacular food, Gjerde says, but you have to understand the effort that went into it.
GJERDE: And then to get that on a table somewhere and get somebody to understand what that whole thing costs is a huge challenge.
CHARLES: The room is crowded now, and loud. The farmers have green name tags, chefs have red ones. There are way more farmers than chefs though, nobody's quite sure why. Even with that hiccup, by the end of the evening most of the farmers and chefs I talked to were going home happy. They'd made some promising contacts, they said. One farmer had sold a whole lamb right on the spot. And the Heaneys, the farmers who'd gone in a little nervous, were smiling - three chefs were interested in their eggs. Dan Charles, NPR News.
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