Of the Land

By: Delaney Young

Produce travels hundreds to thousands of miles to get to grocery stores and then to restaurants but Leda Hermecz is trying to challenge that. Hermecz owns the 100 Mile Bakery in Eugene, Oregon where they source all of their ingredients from the Willamette Valley. She explained, “You can define locally however you want, and it can have no meaning. For me, local means a hundred miles or less. But not just packaged locally, the main product is grown here.”

Hermecz cooks in small batches, processes fresh vegetables and fruits, and knows where her food is coming from. Long time customer turned worker Sam Weida said, “I have been coming in for a long time because I care about locally sourcing. Leda is so enthusiastic and so many places aren’t doing things.”

Providing locally sourced food to the community is now Hermecz’s mission, but her original passion in college was theatre. However, after realizing an actress’s life was not for her, she moved to Eugene.

Throughout college she worked in restaurants and enjoyed making food so Hermecz thought, “How could I make food a performance art?” She set out to do just that when she opened her first bakery in Walton, Oregon in 2004. Here, she made their soups and sandwiches with vegetables grown in an attached garden. Hermecz recalls,“At this time ‘Farm to Table’ was not a concept[…] I hadn’t heard anyone else talk about it.”

In 2008, Hermecz closed the bakery and returned to work on a local goat farm. Her friend Andy had the opportunity to represent Eugene slow food in Terra Madre, a global slow food conference in Italy, so Hermecz tagged along. She recalls meeting African ladies making shea butter, Brazilian guys milling grain and Mexican families growing coffee.

Hermecz had an overwhelming feeling surrounded by the people representing their own food cultures. She said, “This awareness came over me that this is what I want to do, I want to be of the land. I own the bakery because this is the thing I can be doing, that is the best for my community.” It took her going global to realize that she needed to go local.

Leda hopes to start getting back into sustainable business consulting, which she did before opening the bakery. Her goal with this practice is to help restaurants  be more sustainable, source more locally, and be more conservative with the use of packaging. “So many food businesses, need the help but don’t know that they need it,” Hermecz explained. While the future of the bakery expanding is undecided, it will be maintained as a working example of how a locally sourced restaurant is possible.