Corduroy Orange

Hi Jesse:

I really enjoy your blog! I like your writing a good deal - I’m a member of the Co-op and get the newsletter so I’ve read your articles. It’s nice to see some food blogs out there that are local to me. I have kind of a silly question: I tried to get Bourdain tickets just over a month ago and they were sold out then. Drue Heinz never sells out. This makes me think that there is some food culture here in Pittsburgh that I’m totally unaware of. I just wanted to ask, am I living under a rock?

Thank you,

Darcy

Actually, the food scene in Pittsburgh was key to attracting me here from New Orleans, and that was before I really understood it to the extent that I do now. I’m sure that you’re already familiar with the Strip District and all the wonderful retailers there (Penn mac, Parma Sausage, Mon Ami Chocolat, Penn Avenue Fish Co, etc), and the many farmers’ markets during the summer; a brief description of the food scene as pertaining to the strip and some other locations is here.

More than that there’s the agricultural belt that surrounds the city where you can get most any product you’d like directly from the farmer. Some info about why I like getting my eggs directly from the farm and the differences between farm eggs and factory eggs is here and some more info about the classifications of eggs and what some of the words on the carton mean is here. A little bit about the first time my friends and I made a bulk purchase of grass-fed beef is here.

I love being able to get my produce directly from a local farm via a community supported agriculture group, or CSA. Some thoughts about my personal CSA are posted here; and the Post-Gazette has a great directory of several CSA options here.

Also, if you’re interested in finding out more about the food scene in Pittsburgh, I would highly encourage you to attend the Farm to Table conference that is happening this Friday and Saturday at the David Lawrence Convention Center. More information about the conference is available here.

I hope this information helps, and that perhaps you learn about something that you weren’t already familiar with. Really, the more I get to know about the culture of food inherent to this city, the more excited I get to be living here.

PS–the Anthony Bourdain package on Ebay sold for $2,247.89! If that’s not an indication of a food scene in the ‘burgh, I don’t know what is!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Advice Column, Pittsburgh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.