Giving Compass' Take:

• Chef Marion Ohlinger works with local farmers to incorporate native Appalachian crops into his dishes while paying homage to other cuisines.

• Are there opportunities in your area to develop local food councils to support local farmers? 

• Here's how eating local just got easier for some North American cities.

“Comfort food is for cowards, that ain’t what we do here,” Chef Marion Ohlinger tells Food Tank. A 12th-generation West Virginian, Ohlinger was born and raised on his family farm and now owns Hill & Hollow restaurant in Morgantown. As part of The Crop Trust #CropsInColor in Appalachia tour, he welcomed Food Tank into his kitchen to learn about what he calls modern Appalachian cuisine—and why it’s important to keep it in Appalachia.

“We do traditional food, but not normal traditional,” he says. For Ohlinger, this means “not losing what we have, but building other things into it.”

Ohlinger works with local farmers to incorporate native Appalachian crops into his dishes while paying homage to other cuisines. As he serves sour corn sambal, a pickled and fermented sour corn—which is the Appalachian equivalent of sauerkraut—turned into Indonesian/Malaysian-style sambal with hot peppers, he explains: “We take something that’s intimately Appalachian and make something more worldly out of it.”

Read the full article on Chef Marion Ohlinger by Emily Payne at Food Tank.