Red Stick Farmers Market, Uprooted

by Sydney "Brown Nose" Blanchard

Each month, our Uprooted series will highlight local chefs, restaurants, organizations, and farmers who are spearheading the farm-to-table and local foodways movements in South Louisiana.

Copper Alvarez is the Executive Director at BREADA. Photo courtesy of Copper Alvarez.

When you're the Executive Director at a local non-profit organization, your role often extends beyond the boardroom.

Just ask Copper Alvarez, Executive Director at BREADA, the Big River Economic & Agricultural Development Alliance. Alvarez finds the formality of her title at the Baton Rouge-based non-profit somewhat amusing. 

“It’s pretty official, but as far as executive directors go, I empty trash on Saturdays," Alvarez laughs. "I do things maybe all executive directors don’t do. We’re a small staff.”

When she's not manning garbage cans, Alvarez said her days are spent maintaining facilities, looking for new site partners, doing administrative grant work, coordinating markets, visiting farms, and working with chefs, farmers, and national groups.

“Every day is a different day, which is why I like it," she said.

The Mississippi native has been with BREADA since the non-profit formed 14 years ago, and in her years at the helm of the organization, she's seen the community come to embrace BREADA's programs including the Red Stick Farmer's Market and Main Street Market in downtown Baton Rouge.

The Red Stick Farmers Market began in 1996 when a group of farmers was recruited for the city's first farmer's market by graduate student Chris Campany as part of his Master's thesis in LSU's Landscape Architecture program.

That November, the first market was held, and six years later, BREADA opened Main Street Market downtown, which serves as a small local business incubator.

In the years since its inception, the Red Stick Farmers Market has become a weekend destination and community gathering place for many in Baton Rouge. Beyond purchasing fresh locally grown produce and quality cuts of meat from area farmers, the Red Stick Farmers Market offers cooking demos, educational opportunities for kids through their Red Stick Sprouts program, and an arts market each month.

But according to Alvarez, some people are still hesitant to take part in the weekly market due to concerns about affordability and accessibility.

"I don't know where the myth started that it is more expensive," she said. "People see the farmer’s market as being for upper class, trendy foodies, but it’s not."

In 2010 BREADA received a grant from the USDA to implement a token program that would match SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) recipients' money up to $10. The grant meant people with Louisiana Purchase cards would have more of an incentive to shop at the market, and it allowed BREADA to better serve the whole community. 

"It expanded what people thought about us," Alvarez said.

It also made a difference in the number of people shopping at the Red Stick Farmer's market.

Alvarez said that when she first started at BREADA, only three to five percent of people nationally shopped at farmer's markets. Now, that number has increased to 10 percent nationally. 

“The trend has finally hit the South," she said. "Hopefully we are just at the precipice of making it grow here. It’s a trend that doesn’t go away."

The farm-to-table scene in Baton Rouge is still shadowed by that of New Orleans, Alvarez said, where tourists are more willing to pay a higher price for cuisine prepared using farm fresh ingredients. 

Though she has seen an increase in Baton Rouge-based chefs' demand for local produce, she admits that most consumers are not demanding local, seasonal produce. 

"Here, the restaurants are up against a lot of chain restaurants," Alvarez said. "Generally, the restaurants who are local have to make a bottom line."

Part of BREADA's mission, and part of Alvarez's role as Executive Director, is to implement programs to people in the city about the seasonality of produce and the importance of choosing "real foods.

"Once you start choosing to eat locally, the freshness, the difference, the nutritional value is so much higher than most people realize," Avarez said. "It’s almost addictive."

Read more Uprooted here:

Nino's Italian, Uprooted
Indie Plate, Uprooted

Nino's Italian, Uprooted

by Sydney "Brown Nose" Blanchard

Each month, our Uprooted series will highlight local chefs, restaurants, organizations, and farmers who are spearheading the farm-to-table and local foodways movements in South Louisiana.

Elton Hyndman plating dishes at this past May's Dinner in the Field event.
Photo courtesy of the Slow Food BR Facebook page and credit to Dubinsky Photography.

Elton Hyndman cares about where his food comes from, and he wants his customers to care too.

The chef-owner at Nino's Italian in Baton Rouge is also the Vice President of Slow Food BR, a local chapter of Slow Food, a global organization founded in 1989 to ensure everyone has access to what they describe as "good, clean, and fair food."

Conceptually, the idea of "slow foods" is to connect the consumer to the grower. It's the antithesis of fast food. In fact, the Slow Food movement arguably began in 1986 after a demonstration at the Spanish Steps in Rome where a McDonald's was set to be built.

But the concept of "farm-to-table" as a way to eat ethically and sustainably didn't take root in the United States until 2000, and the local Slow Food chapter didn't exist until 2009. It's taken Americans, and Louisianans, a while to catch up.

Elton's "eureka moment" happened a few years ago when he and his staff visited a friend who worked at Inglewood Farms.

Elton wanted his staff at Nino’s to tour the farm, meet the farmers and animals there, and cook for the farm hands and crew. Interspersed amongst the Inglewood farmlands were commercial farms that hadn’t begun planting yet.

“To see what their farms looked like when they weren’t being worked was devastating to us,” Hyndman said. “They were brown. They were dead. It looked like the apocalypse."

At Inglewood, half of the fields are planted while the other half rests. Farmers plant rye and encourage healthy insects like bees. According to Hyndman, their land is green, lush, and alive.

After that experience, Hyndman felt compelled to further the slow foods movement.

Now, in his role at Slow Foods BR, Hyndman coordinates chefs for fundraisers that benefit the organization’s programs like Greauxing Healthy, an effort to teach students in East Baton Rouge Parish how to build gardens and cook healthy meals.

At his own restaurant, Hyndman strives to source most of his ingredients locally.

“In the height of the summer, if you take oil, salt, and flour out of it, I can be 85 to 90 percent local,” he said.

But that wasn’t always the case for the Ontario native.

While traveling and learning to cook under different chefs in the U.S., he discovered his passion for fresh, local ingredients.

The first chef he worked under in New Mexico, his mentor, introduced him to the idea of growing his own herbs.

"I remember the oils of the herbs getting on my fingers and not being able to get it off. All night long I kept smelling thyme,” Hyndman said. “The power of the fresh herb garden really made an impact on me."

Fresh Pasta with Louisiana Shrimp at Nino's Italian

Now, in his own restaurant, Hyndman insists on using “fun, exciting, high quality ingredients.”

He loves cooking with locally sourced gulf shrimp, fresh Louisiana strawberries, citrus, and eggs.

"The one thing that makes the biggest impact in my kitchen is farm fresh eggs,” Hyndman said.

Louisiana’s long growing season is exciting to many non-native chefs, and Hyndman said it will ensure a strong farm-to-table scene once the trend takes root here.

For Hyndman, it’s about more than high quality ingredients. It’s about keeping money in the state and having the money he spent on local ingredients find its way back to his restaurant.

"I want to support people that can support me,” Hyndman said. “There’s a selfishness to it.”

Right now, Hyndman said, the farm-to-table movement is almost entirely chef-led. He said he hopes that more customers begin asking the hard questions and demanding more from restaurants.

"I think it's important that we start asking questions about where our food comes from,” he said. “And are the people who grew, harvested, transported, are they being treated fairly? It's time to start realizing that $3.99 is an inappropriate amount of money to spend on 2500 calories of food."