STARKVILLE — As a restaurant owner and chef, Ty Thames loves watching all of those “extreme” cooking shows that litter the cable TV landscape.
“I always wondered what it would be like to be on one of those shows,” said Thames, co-owner and chef at Starkville’s Restaurant Tyler.
On Saturday, Thames won’t have to wonder anymore.
Although the event won’t be televised, Thames will put his skills to the test under circumstances that would rival any of those featured on TV.
“Let’s see. I’ll be preparing a seven-course meal using only locally-sourced ingredients, and I’ll be doing it in, basically, a field,” Thames said. “So, yeah, I’d say that’s a challenge. Wouldn’t you?”
Thames is volunteering his skills as a chef for the “Farm To Table Dinner,” a fund-raising event for the Starkville-based Gaining Ground Sustainability Institute of Mississippi. The dinner will be held at Strawberry Fields Farm in west Starkville.
According to its website, Gaining Ground is “state-wide educational, research and outreach network … focusing on improving quality of life through sustainable building, farming, recreation and conservation practices. By educating individuals in making sustainable choices we are gaining ground on issues of equity, poverty, education, health and the environment.”
Saturday’s dinner is a demonstration of how theory can be put into practice, said event coordinator Mandi Sanders. All of the ingredients used at the dinner come from within 100 miles, she said.
Building a menu wasn’t the most difficult aspect of putting the dinner together, though.
“Honestly, the hardest part at first was knowing that there were all these people in our area who are producing food and not being able to get in touch with them,” Sanders said. “Some of these people have been farming for a long time; they aren’t necessarily as plugged-in as a lot of people because most of their business is by word of mouth. It took a while to get in touch with them, but on one hand, that’s a big part of what Gaining Ground does — building a network and putting all of these people together.”
Thames said the ingredients determine the menu.
“Definitely,” he said. “I planned the dinner based on what’s available, so that means some of the ingredients are not what I would normally use – everything from molasses to quail eggs to catfish.”
Another prominent item on the dinner menu is goat.
“Preparing goat will be very interesting,” Thames said. “It’s something you don’t use very often, but it’s very similar to lamb.”
Thames has also used the goat milk to prepare a goat cheese for the dinner.
Thames is bringing 16 of his staff to help prepare and serve the dinner. As a result, Restaurant Tyler will be closed Saturday.
Sanders said the response to the dinner has been gratifying.
“We are sold out,” said Sanders. “We had planned for 50 and I think we finally cut it off at 70.”
Tickets for the dinner are $125.
Gaining Ground was created a little over two years ago around the kitchen table of Dr. Mike Buehler and his wife, Alison.
“Basically, it grew out of conversations Mike and I began to have with our friends and neighbors,” Alison Buehler said.
The Buehlers first began to think about the concept of sustainability shortly after moving back to Mississippi (Mike is a Starkville native) six years ago.
“We lived in Knoxville, Tenn., and alternative energy is really a big deal there – wind farms, solar panels, that sort of thing,” Alison said. “When we moved to Mississippi, my husband wanted to buy some solar panels for our home, but he couldn’t find a single place in Mississippi that sold them. Finally, we found one guy that did solar panels.”
Slowly the Buehlers began to question the way they lived. They had been “conspicuous consumers,” they realized.
“A 5,000-square-foot home, SUVs, three kids. We couldn’t do anything for ourselves,” Alison observed.
The Buehlers began to consider how they could change that.
“I think we came to realize that the way we are living, the way most Americans are living, was not sustainable. What kind of world do we want to leave our children? It’s naïve to think that resources are not exhaustible, so we started thinking about ways we could become more self sufficient.”
Alison said the idea of sustainable living – and self-sufficiency – is really an old idea.
“If you think about the way we lived before World War II, there’s your model in a lot of respects,” she said. “Back then, people lived off what was locally available. They made many of the things they use in every-day life. They knew how to do those things. But in the last two generations, we’ve lost a lot of that general knowledge.”
A big part of Gaining Grounds’ focus is on what the Buehlers call “localization not globalization.”
“We feel that globalization is really a bad thing for everybody involved,” she said. “So we stress buying local. When you buy from a big chain, only about $10 out of the $100 you spend stays in the local economy. When you buy locally, that number is $60, sometimes even more. That can have a huge impact on a local economy.”
Although the idea of sustainability and “green living’ is often viewed as a liberal point of view, Alison Buehler says it’s really an apolitical concept.
“There are so many things today that divide people, but what we’ve found is that what we are proposing really unites people,” she said. “You go to our meetings and you will see Tea Party people hugging Occupy people, vegetarians hugging hunters. It really is a shared concern when you really give it some thought.”
Those interested in learning more about Gaining Ground can visit its website at http://www.ggsim.org.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 41 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
