DERACINATED IN DC

We left an early-evening movie looking for some place to have dinner in Georgetown. "We use the best naturally-raised and organic ingredients we can find, and source from local growers, ranchers and fishermen throughout the mid-Atlantic whenever possible," boasted the menu of one high-end restaurant on M Street. Another place two blocks west described itself as "a neighborhood restaurant serving responsibly sourced seafood and local products." A third, on K Street by the old harbour (like so many urban American waterfronts, it used to actually be a harbour; now it's a retail and condo complex that calls itself "The Washington Harbour"--yes, with the extra European "u", too), says it is "owned by and sources [sic] the highest quality products from family farmers across the country." We settled on a 30-year-old Vietnamese hole-in-the-wall on Wisconsin Avenue. Too much conspicuous virtue makes my stomach hurt.

I should say right off that I am in favor of traditional agriculture, small farms and local production. This is because I like apples that taste like apples rather than wax, chicken that tastes like chicken rather than boiled sofa, and beef that will neither make me ill nor turn my (non-existent) daughter fertile in kindergarten. What Adam Platt, in a very funny and spot-on piece about the locavore phenomenon, calls "the excruciating preciousness of it all" I could happily do without. Virtue, the saying goes, is doing what's right when nobody is looking. These restaurateurs and their like have turned it into a marketing ploy.

Mr Platt hits on a subtler point about local cuisine, as well. He mentions a trip to Maine, and recalls "a time not long ago when aging WASP families in their decaying compounds subsisted on a steady diet of Triscuits, deviled eggs and gin." Is that not also local food, of a sort?

At the first of those three restaurants I passed by, the menu was offering tuna carpaccio with melon, Thai basil, scallion and yuzu vinaigrette as an appetizer. This is what mid-Atlantic fisherman historically would have called "bait, with salad". Another of the restaurants served prosciutto-wrapped halibut with herb oil, as well as a platter of bresaola, prosciutto, sopressata and caperberries. The ingredients on these menus might have been local, but the cuisine was not. To my mind, there is something perverse about fetishising local ingredients and then using them to produce the sort of transnational, high-end Franco-Italian cuisine with Asian accents that you could find in pretty much any city in the developed world.

Admittedly, this is what sells, but chefs in the culinarily rich, and underpublicised, mid-Atlantic region ought to make at least the occasional nod to local preparations, as well as just local ingredients. The most memorable dish I had at the parade of wonders that is Wylie Dufresne's WD-50 restaurant in downtown New York consisted of pickled beef tongue with cubes of fried mayonnaise, tomato molasses, and a row each of lettuce and onion diced impossibly small. It wasn't just the wizardry of frying mayonnaise (the NYT ran a profile of Mr Dufresne in their Science section that explained how he did it). It was the wittiness of the dish as a whole: the deconstructed deli sandwich was Mr Dufresne's tip of the toque to his neighborhood's eastern European Jewish heritage.

Food gives a region, a city, a country its character; it is not pure sustenance. I yield to nobody in my love of the pig, and joy that pork belly has found its way back into favor. I may even have managed to quell my distaste at the first of that virtuous trio above, and ordered something called an "eco-friendly food's pork chop, [served with] lamb's quarters and chanterelle salad, braised pork belly and fresh polenta." I could not help wondering, though, how much deeper the local connection would be if the belly and polenta had only been combined into a high-end scrapple.