This summer, I've been eating out a lot. And there is one term that I am getting so tired of hearing: Farm to table.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea that the term espouses, the concept of a chef using just-picked, in-season ingredients culled from a farm just down the road. I imagine the farmer himself pulling up to the kitchen door on his tractor, with a big bushel basket of gorgeously ripe vegetables, the dirt still clinging to ruby-red beets, and peaches as rosy as the cheeks of a putto.

And at least here in Atlanta, I'm not too far off the mark. Chefs here really seem to care about where their ingredients come from, and the temperate climate (and surprisingly close farms, even a couple within the city limits) mean they have plenty to choose from. I'll see them checking out our small-but-satisfying farmers' markets, identified as food professionals only by their calculating eyes, large orders, and Dansko clogs. And in the restaurants themselves, the menus usually proudly identify the source of certain ingredients, listing the name of the farm.

I guess my biggest fear is that the term "farm to table" is going to be another one of those buzzwords that everyone starts using, until its meaning gets diluted (I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that even McDonald's is hopping on the farm-to-table bandwagon [1], which still boggles my mind). I already find myself tuning out when a waiter uses the words in describing the night's specials, especially if she can't actually say which farm the ingredients came from, or why it's special. At one restaurant I dined in recently, the server told us about an heirloom tomato salad made of produce that the farmer personally delivered to the restaurant every morning. I was lulled into my farmer-on-a-tractor reverie until the server told us what farm the tomatoes happened to be from, and I realized that it was quite a few miles from the restaurant, and then all I could imagine was the gas wasted just so that diners wouldn't have to suffer day-old tomatoes.

Ultimately, my hope would be that this whole farm-to-table craze will not be a passing fad, dying off like the exotic-salt mania or becoming ubiquitous like the trend of small, tapas-style plates. Instead, I hope that it becomes just a way of doing business. I hope that chefs will use their local purveyors where it makes sense, when they have a great-quality product, or a wonderful story to tell, or when they're doing good things for the environment and the community. Who knows, maybe our country's food chain will return to how it used to be before huge agribusinesses, refrigerated trucks and produce bred for shelf life over flavor. A time when being a locavore was no big deal, because that's pretty much all that was available to you. Maybe then I'll get my farmer on a tractor after all.

Image courtesy royal_broil [2].