Sunday Rerun: If a farmer eats at a restaurant and takes the leftovers home, is that farm-to-table-to-farm?

When no one was looking, restaurant owners came up with a new term for their cuisine..they said, "Let's call it Farm To Table, and then people will figure that the string beans they are eating were hanging on a pole in some farmer's back yard three hours ago.


Listen, I know there is a diffy-diff between fresh chow and something that has Libby's Libby's Libby's on the label label label. Why, young barefoot Mark would run to the back 40 and grab corn off the stalk, shucking it on the way back to the house, once the water was boiling in the big stockpot, so when I gobbled corn on the cob back then, the corn was as fresh as could be.  That was the great thing about the life in the real Farmville...our house bordered a big farm and we were able to get corn and berries and melons and pay the farmer at his stand down by the church on Sundays. 


You will never get that much flavor out of a can or frozen bag o'corn.


And beyond certain curiosities such as New York City eateries being able to offer "local" honey because there is a certain goodness from the pollen gathered in Central Park and all those high-rise flower pots on the Lower East Side, all that gourmet grindage you enjoy at Chez Quis comes from somewhere. Assuming that the lumps in your crabcake did not come from the chef's crabtraps on Middle River, does it matter if they are lumps from Carolina or Florida or elsewhere?


It didn't take long for a reporter from the Tampa Bay Times to investigate the claims of farm-to-tableness and find many of them bogus.


My thing is, having heard so many stories about diners substituting cutout circles of shark for scallops (and this is really awful when they use a pool shark!) or lobster bisque that is totally devoid of lobster, just serve me what I order and don't try faking me out by claiming it's local or never frozen or never canned. 

And, yes, please, I will need a go-box.