Savour Elora Fergus: Local Flavour, Local Food
Savour Elora Fergus promotes the many agri-culinary opportunities in the area through leveraging and integrating the existing tourist offerings with an enhanced agri-culinary focus. The initiative promotes awareness of locally-grown and market-ready foods to both the local and tourist consumers at events such as Sensational Elora, Grand Taste, two farmers’ markets and through the award winning visitors guide, Recipes to Experience.
Savour Elora Fergus is our promise of local food at its best. We support our thriving local food culture by partnering with growers and microprocessors, retailers and restaurants, to offer both visitors and residents something very special.
A fundamental evolution in food today is the movement to buy local. It is a call that resonates throughout Wellington County, and the practice is readily supported by many area residents and restaurateurs. With the diversity of over 100 local farms and markets, anyone looking for farm-fresh produce—from fruits, vegetables and dairy to maple syrup, elk, beef or ostrich meat and more—doesn’t have far to go. It’s all right here.
Today more than ever, people are connecting with foods in a new way. We’re highly conscious of how far our food travels, of who grows it and where. The way we eat, and how we think about that experience, is changing too.
In culinary circles, gout de terroir is all about the soil. Commonly used in the wine industry, terroir is now also a term acknowledging the sense of place in the taste of our foods. Foods can differ in taste—sometimes subtly, sometimes distinctly —due to soils, watersheds and local climate. What pasture fed animals eat, the climate of a region, the soil produce grows in and the small-batch procedures that farmers use: All these combine to create authentic tasting product, whether it’s artisanal cheese, grass fed beef or root vegetables.
Throughout our community, you’ll see many examples of what we’re doing to share and promote the bounty of the lands that surround the Grand River. We are actively connecting businesses with agriculture, chefs with growers. Bed & Breakfasts are working on collective buying to put more local foods on the breakfast table. Small retail food stores are meeting with one another to build partnerships that combine individual strengths and resources. The commitment to local food is everywhere. We’re doing it all in the spirit of community. You could say we are returning to our roots. Like many people, we know that sustainable farming is not an option, but a necessity; that the local food movement is not a trend, but a fundamental transformation in the collective mindset of communities across Ontario. We are a proud and active part of that change.
COMING SOON! will be an extensive directory of all of our local restaurants, producers, growers, and microprocessors to highlight our diverse agri-culinary industry.
So come in and savour that experience. Bon Appétit!