Zack Trabbold has worked all over town, from Del Frisco’s Steakhouse to The Bygone in Harbor East (where he was chef de cuisine). But the Wilmington, DE, native had long dreamed of having a place of his own. In late August, he opened The Local, an elevated comfort-food spot in Harford County. Within a few months, the 90-seat restaurant had become so popular, Trabbold decided to expand next door, nearly doubling the size of the space.

“I’ve had the concept in my head for a long time,” says the 33-year-old chef, who was nominated as Best Chef in Maryland in 2019. “It’s completely different from any other restaurant in Maryland. A lot of people say, ‘farm-to-table,’ but we don’t call it ‘farm-to-table,’ we just buy whatever we can locally to suit our style of cooking. All our beers on draft are strictly beers from Maryland. The liquors, and cordials, including Black Water Distillery and Sagamore, are all from Maryland. Even our charcuterie boards are custom-made right here in Fallston.”

Why did you want to open in Harford County?
There was just this lack of great spots in Harford County, where I live. I’m already looking for a second location.

Tell me about some of the signature items on the menu.
We feature comfort food but it’s not something you’d get anywhere else. For example, we have pot pie, but it’s a lobster pot pie. We have beef stroganoff, but the noodles are homemade, the beef is from Roseda Farm, the mushrooms are Hen of the Woods, and there’s some blue cheese on top and a red-wine reduction sauce. Our food is comfort food but it’s more like a Charleston, South Carolina, style of cooking.

How challenging is it to source locally in The Old-Line State?
We can get our cheese, our milk, our eggs, our chicken, our beef, and our wine, all right here. It’s all in Harford County within a 10-mile radius. I’ve traveled the country, from Texas to Chicago, and I’ve never been in a place where, from seafood to meat, you can get everything in one place.

How did you decide to become a chef?
My dad worked in radio his whole life, and I thought I’d follow in his footsteps, then my dad got sick, and my brother got custody of me at 15. My brother was waiting tables at Adriatico in Rehoboth Beach. I had to get a job, so I started bussing tables. My brother paid for me to go to The Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College in Philadelphia.

Like so many chefs, you have a few tattoos. Can you tell me about one that matters to you most?
I have an Anthony Bourdain portrait on my back. Like me, he came from nothing and worked his way up. He impacted so many people. That’s what it’s all about for me. There’s nothing better than hearing someone say, “This is the best meal I’ve ever had.”

Renee Brooks Catacalos knows a thing or two about local food. She served as the deputy director of Future Harvest-Chesapeake Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture, published and wrote for Edible Chesapeake magazine from 2006 to 2009, and has eaten almost exclusively locally for over a decade.

Her first book, The Chesapeake Table: Your Guide to Eating Local, will be released in October and outlines why she’s been hooked on the local food movement from the start, which foods you can only find in the Chesapeake region, and how you can benefit from the fruits—literally and figuratively—of local farmers’ labors.

You’ve been working with local food for years now. Where did you start?
My interest in local food started as a consumer, actually. I’d lived abroad in my twenties in places where eating local is pretty common, but when I moved back to DC in 2001, farmers markets and “eat local” campaigns were really starting to take off. I was a little skeptical at first, but I found that shopping and eating locally was a lot of fun. It was so interesting to find out where the food comes from and talk to the suppliers about how they grow and care for it all, and it all tasted incredible, like noticeably more flavorful than food from a lot of grocery stores.

In addition to taste, what are some other benefits of eating locally?
There are so many! The health and environmental benefits are some of the most important for me, because when you buy locally grown food, especially meat, you’re choosing not to support industrial farms that use a lot of toxic chemicals. There are even socioeconomic benefits. Right now, eating locally is a little more expensive, but in order to allow a broader range of people access to healthier, seasonal, well-raised food, we have to buy it so that it’s economically viable for the farmers to continue making it and eventually lower the prices.

Giving up the convenience of going to the nearest supermarket and eating largely locally grown food can seem daunting.
Yeah, lots of people are definitely daunted by it beforehand, mostly because they feel like they don’t have the time, the know-how, or the money to do it. But it’s really like any other food-specific commitment, like being a vegetarian, or a vegan, or kosher, or gluten-free, except this one doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Even if you just get to the farmers’ market once a month to buy a box of peaches or if you know the grocery store stocks local honey, that’s a great place to start.

What does The Chesapeake Table bring to the conversation about local food?
One of my biggest frustrations with other books on local food is that so many of them take a really broad, national viewpoint, and that’s hard to translate into a real game plan for consumers. That’s why I wanted to take this regional focus and be much more specific about the Chesapeake region, because there is so much the Chesapeake offers us in terms of local food. My book also comes from a consumer perspective, which is sort of rare. I don’t work directly in the industry anymore, and it’s hard to balance a job that is not related to food with trying to shop and cook and support the local food system, but it gave me a unique perspective.

This book isn’t everything you’ll ever need to know about local food, but I thought it could give people a good starting point with information about the local food system and the Chesapeake region, and hopefully it’ll prime them to keep learning on their own.

So why is the Chesapeake such a great place to eat locally?
I don’t think people appreciate how special the Chesapeake Bay actually is. Because it’s a mix of salt and fresh water, it creates such a fertile place where so many kinds of food can thrive. The seafood, of course, is the sweetest and the biggest because they put on fat during cold winters, and because this climate gets four distinct seasons, we get this extensive range of seasonal produce. Basically, we have anything except tropical foods. You can source almost a complete diet from this region.

What about Baltimore specifically?
Baltimore has a level of infrastructure to support the local food industry that a lot of other cities don’t have yet. In the past decade, the city has started to put money toward funding local farmers, and that’s legitimized that system in both a symbolic and a tangible way. Also, because of its size and diversity, both in the foods that are sold and the people that buy them, the Baltimore Farmers’ Market is one of the best I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been to a lot.

You’re from D.C., but do you have favorite places around Baltimore to eat local food?
Well, of course, I love Woodberry Kitchen and Gertrude’s, but farm-to-table doesn’t have to refer to that new American kind of food. Ananda in Howard County is an Indian resturant, and they have their own garden. There’s also a great website called Chesapeake Farm to Table that’s run by of Calvert’s Gift Farm in Sparks, and it lists a bunch of restaurants around Baltimore that source their food straight from that farm.

The term “farm-to-table” is everywhere now. How do you distinguish what’s legitimate?
The farm-to-table claims can get so ridiculous! I’ve seen peach gummy candy—obviously not farm-to-table since it’s entirely chemicals—labeled as “locally sourced.” A good way to know for sure is just to ask. If restaurants are serving local food, they should easily be able to tell you where the ingredients came from.

Unfortunately for Baltimoreans, most crab cakes are not made entirely with local blue crabs, so if you want something that you can know for sure is straight from the bay, buy crabs in the shell, in their whole, full glory. They taste so much fresher, and then you know exactly what you’re eating because you can see it.

Why is now the right time for this book?
Anniversaries are definitely times to reflect, and it had been about 10 years since I’d gotten into local eating when I came up with the idea for The Chesapeake Table. I started doing a lot of research and thinking a lot about what had changed in the decade, especially as I left the industry and began to look at things as a consumer.

I really am committed to the local food system, and I wanted to contribute something to it that would help it grow. I’m not reinventing the wheel. I’m just bringing light to how much work people are doing to bring local food to people’s dinner tables, and I’m trying to show people that even the tiniest things can make a big difference.

Snow-covered roads, wintry winds, and frigid temperatures may not sound like ideal farming conditions. But the Redlands Farm at St. Timothy School in Stevenson is proof that a little snow doesn’t slow down operations. In a greenhouse, on the school’s more than 160 acres of land, is a fully functional and sustainable farm complete with a multitude of lush greens, clucking chickens, and buzzing honeybees.

The boarding school’s partnership with Bon Appétit Management Company—a farm-to-fork, on-site food service that specializes in organically locally source food—is one of the driving forces behind the year-round harvesting. Redlands Farm provides 60 percent of the fresh vegetables, honey, eggs, and fruit to the school kitchen where the chefs cook everything from scratch to provide three meals a day. 

Started in 1999, Bon Appétit’s program requires chefs to source at least 20 percent of their ingredients from small, owner-operated farms within 150 miles of the kitchen. 

“Thanks to Redlands, our Farm to Fork scores are consistently two or three times that,” said Bon Appétit chef at St. Timothy’s Scott Richter. “They are just nailing it in terms of their quality and freshness. We are so lucky here. It’s every chef’s dream to be able to work with this kind of produce.”

Redlands Farm was started just two years ago when the St. Timothy class of 1965 wanted to fund an environmentally conscience project as a gift to the school. The head of school, Randy Stevens, had the idea of an on-site sustainable farm that would be dedicated to growing produce for the campus.

“A number of things just lined up,” Stevens said. “We really wanted to find a way to link health and wellness together, and bring all those pieces together to really shift the way that students look at their overall nutrition.”

As a living classroom, the farm has garnered the interest from students, who receive an afterschool activity credit for working on the farm. One student in particular, junior Ronelle Williams from Douglasville, Georgia, has fallen in love with the farm and has begun making connections between nutrition and sustainability.

“I do my homework and sit with the chickens,” she said. “I’ve come to love nature. The farm is my favorite place on campus.”

Aside from the partnership with Bon Appétit, Redlands Farm is meant to teach the girls about economic and environmental sustainability. Instead of growing food for profit, the goal of the farm is to grow enough food to offset the costs of maintaining the farm. Handling day-to-day operations, like plowing and planting, is 2008 almuna Sammy Clopton and her husband Adam. 

“We try to design a loose curriculum,” Sammy said. “I have certain things that I want them to get out of it besides just planting. They need to know the reason behind it. We try to give them a bigger picture of small-scale agriculture and sustainability.” 

The multi-pronged approach to the farm also includes an educational resource for the students, including the science associated with the crops. Each decision the school makes about Redlands Farm is measured against the environmental impact standards in Maryland. By researching and using best practices, they are able to dramatically decrease erosion and redirect runoff that will reduce excessive nutrients in the streams, which eventually flow into the Chesapeake Bay.

The ultimate goal of Redlands is to become a fully sustainable and include livestock down the line. The hope to also partner with local inner-city middle schools to develop a mentorship program is also in the works.

“It’s amazing to see how it’s flourished and what we’ve developed here,” Stevens said. “We are trying to connect all the academic pieces—helping them look at the ecosystem, and their footprint. We are trying to be a green school.”