If Bill Clinton were writing about Pacific Northwest regional cooking he would likely proclaim, "It’s the food, stupid." A New York Times moniker could follow with "All the food that’s fit to eat." And Portland’s KINK radio would allow "True to the Food" to acquire new resonance.

You can imagine the robust flavors and decadent kitchen impulses of Cajun cuisine and also vividly sense Tex-Mex cooking with its intense heat and smoke so fitting for a bastard cuisine. New England and California cooking evoke images of clam bakes and pyramid-shaped salads with obscure ingredients. And, if your culinary mind gets stuck in the Kansas City heartland, you’ll lose little time in a fantasy detour to the nearest BBQ joint. American cooking has embraced all of these at one time or another and these rotating regional cuisines are easy to recollect in our collective gastronomic imaginations.

But what is it about the cooking style of the Pacific Northwest that’s so hard to pin down?

The quality, diversity and abundance of local ingredients separate this region’s culinary identity from others in the country. The ethnic and cultural accents of cooking are less important than patiently allowing the pristine flavors of these regional ingredients to emerge. The best restaurant chef or humble home cook, regardless of background or the methods used to prepare any particular dish, stands on an equal footing in this food environment.

Michelangelo once responded to the question of how he sculpted the Pieta: "The form was in the stone and I just chipped away the excess." An apt metaphor for Cascadian cooking. The art of cooking in this culinary habitat differs from the technique and spice-centric cuisines of other parts of the country. Here there are fewer formulae and more emphasis on understanding—even listening to—the ingredients at hand and proceeding with their essence in mind. The roster of those ingredients is so well known: the seafood, cheeses, fruits and vegetables, herbs, meats, mushrooms, truffles, etc. Think of each one as having a voice, either solo or in concert with others, that requires little more than the culinary equivalent of sensitive syntax to assemble.

If cooking in this region is ingredient-driven then the corollary is that we need to expand direct access to these wonderful foods. Portland’s geography and the proximity of the surrounding bounty have always determined the city’s diet. With fertile valleys, two river sheds, the ocean, mountains and rangelands, Portland has never lacked for pristine foods at their freshest.

The city’s rich history of markets dates to the city’s founding. By 1872 the New Market and Theatre building on Ankeny Square housed a unique one-stop shopping destination: a food-centric market on the ground floor (with an extensive oyster selection) and a burlesque hall above. In the early 20th century, SW Yamhill, spanning 1st to 5th Avenues, supported hundreds of merchants on a daily basis. The largest public market in North America opened along the Willamette River seawall in 1933 but due to City Hall corruption and land speculation it closed just eight years later. Since then, Portland has been without a full time, year-round market although the vibrant network of seasonal Farmers Markets in the region maintains the connection to our edible geography and history.

Currently, there are many ways customers intersect with local foods. Think of a continuum that extends from farm stands, U-pick and CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture where you buy farm product futures) to farmers’ markets, coops and public markets. From there, the spectrum of choices continues to those supermarkets making Herculean efforts to showcase local producers as well as chain grocers whose rhetoric may not match their performance, but they still try. Yes, even Costco and other warehouse category killers are beginning to de-centralize their purchasing to include some local foods.

In other parts of the country, to say that you’re bereft of a defined cuisine would be a cultural deficiency of immense proportions—almost unheard of anywhere. Just imagine how the Deep South or the Southwest would weather that blow! But here in the Pacific Northwest, defining cuisine as a style of cooking misses the key point: it’s all about the food and our ability to coax these amazing raw materials to new heights regardless of who is cooking and in what kind of environment.