By: Katie Kadue | July 12 2010
Posted in San Francisco Bay Area - Find It - San Francisco

If you look up "locavore" in the dictionary, you won't see a picture of Jessica Prentice. But if you look it up on Google, you just might: Prentice coined the word herself in 2005. Since then, the idea of eating local – sticking to food grown within a hundred or so miles of your kitchen – has gone global: from shopping at the farmers market to thinking twice about that imported Chilean apple, consumers are getting increasingly conscious of where their food comes from, and they're going to greater lengths to get it from closer to home.

Photo: Katie Kadue

But for some loyal locavores, raising backyard chickens and subsisting on squash all winter long isn't enough: they want to go whole-hog on this local sustainable food thing. So they make every effort to, well, eat the whole (locally and sustainably raised) hog.

At Three Stone Hearth, the worker-owned cooperative Prentice helps run in Berkeley, a weekly menu offers nutrient-dense dishes that use everything from liver to bones, not letting any part of the animal go to waste. Philosophies like Prentice's harken back to forgotten culinary traditions, whose reliance on staples like bone broths and organ-enriched meat patties is easy on the conscience and the pocketbook alike: making your own broth means you don't have to go out and buy it at the store, and you don't have to throw away those calcium-rich bones.

But in the age of the boneless skinless chicken breast, the idea of butchering a whole animal can be intimidating, and as interesting an idea as offal is, it takes an awfully gutsy home cook to pull it off. So if you're not quite ready trot out those trotters, let Three Stone Hearth lend a hand. It's not quite homemade, but having on hand a jar of broth or batch of picadillo, locally made from carefully sourced ingredients, makes cooking the rest of the meal more manageable. And if you want to bone up on your cooking skills, volunteer in their West Berkeley kitchen. You won't be paid for your labor, but you might bring home some bacon – or this week's lamb patties, made with rice, liver, lovage, and local love.

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