Charlottesville Food by Casey Ireland Page A

business as a way to stay closer to home and children. After reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books to his daughter, Rohdie realized that the family in the story “spent all day together. It was only 140 years ago,” he muses. “How did we lose that?” His current occupation makes it easy for his family to understand his job, which is simply that “Daddy makes donuts.”

    An apple cider donut from Carpe Donut. Photo by Casey Ireland .
    If the quality of food items bought at Carpe Donut is any indication of the way the Rohdie family eats, one only wishes they could take a seat at that dinner table. Bracing kombucha from Barefoot Bucha, spiced apple cider and a mouth-coating Italian hot chocolate so thick that it resembles ganache are beverages available to customers who buy a single or several dozen donuts. The fried dough rings themselves are surprisingly flavorful and dense, filled with spice and just eggy enough. The donuts are magical to eat, easily savored until the last taste of cinnamon-sugar coating gets licked off of fingertips. The donut cart’s location in the UVA amphitheater in 2012 brightened up January afternoons for many students who sat in old libraries, scooping remnants of hot chocolate out of small paper cups and dusting crumbs off of books and laps.
    Like Will Richey of Revolutionary Soup and the Whiskey Jar, Rohdie’s shop is “a secret advocate for organic and sustainable food.” With glee, he relates how a mother, upon reading the shop’s list of ingredients, will tell her child, “Okay, you can have one donut.” According to Rohdie, a diner can taste the difference in local, organic and sustainably raised ingredients when only five are used in the entire product. Donuts at Carpe Donut are surprisingly seasonal. The main impact on the shop comes from cider and eggs. Carpe Donut gets its cider from Pennsylvania when the local cider production stops. The local supply from nearby orchards constitutes four months’ worth of cider, though Rohdie freezes up to three more months’ worth before going regional. In the past couple years, the pastured egg supply has been essentially constant. The shop is always on the lookout for more local ingredients, particularly flour. “The localness of food can get exquisite,” Rohdie notes. “I’ve expanded my definition to include local production of food.” Carpe Donut is returning to frying the donuts in organic palm fruit oil, which is, as a non-GMO product, six times more expensive than soybean oil.
    Donut shops and small businesses are not the only ways in which locavore interests have been made less fancy. If local food started as an upper-class movement, one specific to the highly educated or those with disposable incomes, its success has not gone unnoticed by the corporate and the everyday. “Greenwashing” has become as commonplace in restaurants as it has in grocery stores, with seemingly everyone in the business trying to get their thumbs in the locavore pie. Chipotle Mexican Grill, a popular chain of southwestern restaurants, claims to serve “food with integrity.” Integrity, for Chipotle, involves incorporating local products into its menu along with antibiotic-free meats and recycled napkins. Its actual practice of sourcing local food, however, can be somewhat more opaque.
    On its website, Chipotle declares its interest in and support of local foods, noting that “there are many ways to define” what makes an ingredient local, subscribing to a 350-mile radius when sourcing local produce. The very fact that a company as large as Chipotle, with over 1,500 locations in North America and Europe, includes local foods as a business mission is decidedly new and forward thinking. However, the amount of local foods that make up the menu at any given Chipotle is neither disclosed by the business nor easily accessible to curious diners.