Milanese style Pork Medallions with Tomato-Caper Sauce, from the Oliver House in Gordonsville.

Turkey stuffed with chicken and duck makes Turkducken, best when the turkey, chicken, and duck come from local farms, such as Ayrshire in Upperville.

ith a slew of new food-minded books hitting the shelves (Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon’s Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally), the world’s gaze has shifted to the idea that eating local is good for us—for reasons affecting the environment, the local economy, and our personal health. But in Virginia’s northern Piedmont, eating local is far from new. Nothing demonstrates this more fundamentally than the culinary trail from farm to fork in the region’s superb restaurants.

Quite possibly, The Inn at Little Washington started it all. Almost 30 years ago Patrick O’Connell and then partner Reinhardt Lynch turned their catering business into what is now the world famous Inn at Little Washington in Rappahannock County. They first encountered delivery problems as no one outside of the small hamlet had heard of them or understood where they were situated. Delivery people told them to, “Make up your mind! Are you in Washington, or in Virginia?” O’Connell turned to local farmers to help.

O’Connell taught many of his nearby producers a new way to market vegetables when he told them to stop growing big zucchinis. “Grow them the size of a fi nger. I’ll pay you the same amount of money.” The specialty market basket of mini vegetables took off. Now he has plenty of growers delivering to meet his specific needs. Occasionally he still buys from the back door farmer with the just-picked produce. Even his sous chefs have joined the growing brigade and often grow specialty produce they can then sell directly to the Inn.

With Planet Earth Diversified (www.planetearthdiversified.com) in Charlottesville, O’Connell has developed a true ecological bond. They deliver edible flowers and micro greens several times a week and leave with “the old frying oil to power the delivery van,” in the words of the Inn’s marketing manager, Rachel Hayden. It’s all about the freshest, local product available, whether it is meat, poultry, or produce, she says, and O’Connell believes in getting the best of whatever is available; if it’s organic, she calls it a “great bonus.” Most importantly, O’Connell believes in the family farm and loves to “take the indigenous product to the next level.”

Nowadays, local high-quality produce—from beautiful micro greens and local fennel and root vegetables that would make a turnip smile—can be found in myriad regional restaurant kitchens. Executive Chef Todd Gray of Washington D.C.’s Equinox Restaurant and Middleburg’s Market Salamander praises this bounty of exciting products: “The region allows us to transition from asparagus to tomatoes to corn, and by fall we’re ready for squashes and celery root. We put it on the menu when we can get it locally. There’s nothing like eating local.”

Indeed, consumers themselves are as savvy as these celebrity chefs in finding the best local produce. Farmers markets have become major industries with crowds arriving early for the freshest items. Ann Yonkers, founder and executive director of Fresh-Farm Markets, a regional group of producer-only farmers markets, has seen growth from 15 farmers in 1997 to the current roster of 55. “The customer has become more knowledgeable about what to expect in season and when to look for it,” she says. Yonkers also credits producers for developing savoir-faire, understanding that they can make additional income by coming to farmers markets.

Nationally, media products like the public television series “Chefs A’Field” (www.chefsafield.com) raised consumer consciousness. Producer Heidi Hanson brought together the country’s top chefs and their producers to demonstrate their inner-connectedness and mutual respect for the land. Hanson added the chefs’ children to help viewers understand where all the food comes from.

The intertwined relationship between the producer, the chef, and the consumer has created a better end result for everyone. Food is fresher, the land is being used for what it was intended for, and creativity has become a natural end product. Deliveries are not cross-country but often from tractor to door step in a matter of hours. Many farmers have become sophisticated marketers, selling not just tomatoes but off shoots such as tomato sauce or sun-drieds.

Here in the Piedmont, setting the example on the production side of things is Sandy Lerner, whose Loudoun County farm is often cited as the model for sustainable farming in the region. Growing up on a family farm in California and then living as an adult in the English countryside gave her the knowledge and emotional understanding to turn her 1996 purchase of Ayrshire Farm into a model of sustainability.

Lerner has little patience for farming with chemicals. Her mantra is “what is good for the animals is good for the consumer. We need to feed them what we eat.” As a co-founder of Cisco Systems, Lerner recognizes how financially fortunate she is, since most farmers, she points out, need an additional job to support themselves.

“I bought a farm and wanted to farm. I never considered chemical agriculture,” she recalls. “I was lucky to find a large intact piece of property where I could turn the land, which had been ravaged by conventional agriculture and neglect, and amend the soil.” She loves the area because consumers understand that the foods “may cost a little more at the cash register,” but high quality foods will keep them healthy.

At Ayrshire Farm she has a USDA-certified kitchen with a cadre of young chefs who enjoy working with local products to prepare food for her Hunter’s Head Tavern in Upperville. She also operates nearby Middleburg’s Home Farm Store, which sells Ayrshire’s rose veal, eggs, chicken, turkeys, and more. Everything works together as she strives to rebuild the farmer-food connection while simultaneously raising consumer consciousness about animal health and product quality.