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Boro Foodshed

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berriesLast spring, Rebekah Wilce of Cobble Hill borrowed a friend’s bike and hopped the Long Island Railroad to visit the 100-acre Green Thumb organic farm in Watermill, NY. The glorious day of petting Scottish Highland cows and seeing how asparagus grows “like some kind of alien spore emerging from the ground,” was marred by only one problem: “Some of the strawberries got squishizzled on the way back,” she recounted to friends in an email. The bag of fruit had been strapped to the back of her bike.”So I made a strawberry rhubarb vinaigrette out of the more egregiously injured ones, which I will eat today on a fresh arugula salad with the rest of the fresh strawberries and goat cheese.”

Wilce is one of about 180 individuals and families who pay roughly $400 per season for a weekly box of fresh produce from the Green Thumb as part of the Cobble Hill CSA (CSA stands for “community supported agruculture,” a system in which members buy a share in a farm’s harvest season). Each June, when those strange, seductive, red fruits with the seed-riddled flesh arrive at farmers markets throughout Brooklyn, members of the CSA are invited to take the two-hour trip to the Green Thumb to strengthen the solidarity between city folk and farm folk. “I had a great time, only got a little too much sun, and really appreciate being able to see exactly where my food is coming from,” Wilce said. And, of course, the strawberries—the year’s first local fruit to ripen, and the first taste of homegrown sweetness—were delicious.

The Green Thumb, about 70 miles east of Brooklyn on Long Island’s East End, is part of Brooklyn’s foodshed, the network of farms and waters that feed us, the nourishment equivalent of our watershed. But this farm’s relations with the borough run deeper than most. A decade ago, when the Green Thumb was seeking additional customers, Brooklyn seemed the perfect answer to its problems.

“My brother, Billy, was doing the farmers market in Union Square and it got to be a burnout,” said Johanna Halsey, who goes by Jo. “Driving from here to the city is a nightmare. He had to load everything up and leave at 3 a.m. It was great when it was great, but it was a very long day and if there was a poor turnout, everything would be compost.”

The family had heard about the burgeoning CSA movement and immediately saw the advantages: a built-in group of customers, one drop-off spot where the members come to pick up their farm shares, and payment up front (members write their checks the winter or spring before the season begins). In the years since, this CSA—partly due to the fact that the size of the farm’s truck limited the number of members—has helped inspire a half dozen other Brooklyn CSAs and multiple food-buying clubs. (For a listing of Brooklyn CSAs, visit www.justfood.org.) For the farm, it’s helped keep the three generations employed on the land, even as low potato prices and soaring real estate values have transformed most neighboring farms into McMansions.

In fact, strawberries neatly symbolize a farming mentality that the Halsey family bucked decades ago. (As a delicate fruit where blemishes count, strawberries consistently show up at the top of Department of Agriculture’s list of foods that carry pesticide residues, part of the reasons why organic strawberries might cost more.) The Halsey family farm, the oldest and one of the largest organic farms in New York State, has been on the same oceanside land since 1640. A few decades ago, they began raising tomatoes, corn, peppers, eggplants, and strawberries organically, even as potato-growing neighbors scoffed.

“It’s not enough to grow it, you’ve got to figure out how to sell it,” said Jo, who manages the family’s roadside farmstand on Highway 27, which has been known to cause mid-summer traffic jams. “We try to reinvent the wheel and now we’re biodynamic which is amazing since they’ve totally butchered the word organic,” Jo said, referring to the government’s much-criticized national organic standards.

The market isn’t all that’s changed. “Twenty years ago, we sold more berries than we do now,” said Bill Halsey who grows the strawberries and the farm’s hundreds of other fruits, vegetables, and herbs with his brother Larry. Peachie Halsey, Bill’s mother, confirmed the recent changes.

“When we first opened the stand, people would come from all over and pick flats and flats of strawberries to make jam and pies and to freeze,” she said, not to mention margaritas and other leisure concoctions. “As years went on, fewer and fewer people would come and pick.”

Come June, locally grown strawberries fill shortcakes at seasonally minded restaurants and blenders of smoothie-focused families.But few customers are making jam or pies the way they used to. American shoppers can buy berries—not just strawberries, but also blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries—year round.”Strawberries were a seasonal food,” Mr. Halsey said as he surveyed his three acres of strawberry plants. “It was much more unique. It’s happened with lots of foods. And the first casualty— even before the local farmer—was taste. Nothing tastes like it used to. Carrots, summer squash, corn. You think it tastes good and then you taste your homegrown.”

The fact that strawberries just don’t taste the way they used to might be as much about hard science as irrational nostalgia. Most varieties today are bred for shipability, shelflife, and cosmetic perfection, not flavor. Ninety percent of American strawberries are grown in California, and must withstand the transcontinental voyage. “They are white on the inside, not red, and they have no taste,” said Jo.

The Green Thumb’s berries, in contrast, aren’t bred for shelf life, and don’t have much of one. But they would trounce the transcontinental fruit in the flavor category, and wouldn’t tolerate the trip across the country. (For the curious and skeptical, the farm’s annual tasting event will be held the last Saturday in June. Brooklynites are welcome to pick shoulder-to-shoulder with hordes of crimson lipped children struggling with the age-old dilemma: can you pick faster than you can eat? For details, call 631.726.1900.)

The sweetest strawberry, Mr. Halsey said, should have a dark sheen on the outside and red on the inside. “Look for the ones that have their calices standing,” he said, referring to the green petals around the strawberry stem. “And the ones that birds peck.”

STRAWBERRY RHUBARB VINAIGRETTE
by Rebekah Wilce

1 c. chopped rhubarb
1 1/4 c. chopped strawberries
3 large shallots, coarsely chopped
1 tbsp. sugar
1/3 c. red wine vinegar
3/4 c. olive oil
1/4 tsp. Dijon mustard

Simmer first five ingredients in a small non-reactive saucepan until rhubarb is tender, about 10 minutes. Puree, strain into bowl, and cool. Whisk in oil and mustard. This is wonderful on arugula with goat cheese and more strawberries. Serves 4.

STRAWBERRY MARGARITA

1 pt. fresh strawberries ice
1 lime
3/4 c. tequila

Wash and trim the strawberries, removing any white spots or pieces of leaf or stem. Fill the blender half-full with ice. Juice the lime into the blender, add the tequila and top it off with as many strawberries as you can fit into the blender. Blend until slushy. Pour into glasses garnished with a slice of lime. Serve immediately.

WHAT: The Green Thumb
WHERE: Hwy. 27, Water Mill, 631.726.1900
WHEN: 9 a.m.-5 p.m., Daily
MUST TRY: Strawberries, mesclun, asparagus
IN THE BOROUGH: Cobble Hill CSA, 718.802.1972

Bill Halsey said the sweetest strawberries should have a dark sheen on the outside and red on the inside.

The post Boro Foodshed appeared first on Edible Brooklyn.


Fields of Plenty

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fieldsIn the summer of 2003 my son Aaron and I left our farm in British Columbia and embarked on an extraordinary journey across the US and Canada. We traveled to see fruit growers, meat producers, cheese makers, and vegetable producers, farmers who had mastered the production of certain signature foods and who were using their farms as platforms for education and social and ecological change, folks who were happily married to a place. There was the Willamette melon grower who was “militant about flavor,” the Wisconsin sheep-cheese producers who had built their own culturing caves, and the Chicago farmer raising heirloom tomatoes in abandoned lots. Some of our moments were sentimental (when we visited the farm my great-grandfather bought when he immigrated from Russia in the late 19th century); others were humorous (when we asked a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Indiana to fry some eggs and bacon we had just brought from a nearby farm and, after they finally agreed, threatened to bring them a cow next time).

Our road trip also took us into the darker side of the American food scene, to feedlots and fast food restaurants, into spray helicopters and through vast landscapes planted only to corn and soybeans. This was the contrast for our story of hope and possibility, hope brought forth by a passionate, creative, and resourceful group of food artisans who were replacing the stereotype of farming as a lowly form of drudgery with a powerful image of refined art and craft and honorable profession. The narrative and photographs that follow are just a small sampling of our journey, a glimpse of the return of local food and agriculture back to its rightful place—the heart and the center of our society.

“I am the only one in Washington State that grow penis,” Hilario Alvarez tells us in his broken English as we trail along next to him while he meanders through his fields. “We have green penis, salted penis, and roasted penis. You want to try?”

Green, salted, and roasted what? I look back at Aaron, who looks as puzzled as I am. Hilario walks a little farther, bends over a row of plants I am not familiar with, and pulls one up. Then I get it. Peanuts!

He strips the peanuts off the roots and hands them to us. I hesitate for just a second, like all those uninitiated folks over the years who have accepted my spontaneous offering of uncooked sweet corn or a carrot with soil still clinging to it. We peel the soft shells and savor the taste of fresh peanut for the first time in our lives.

In a neighborhood where many speak only Spanish, the funky plywood sign in front of the farm says, in English, “We Grow a Hundred Types of Vegetables.” This diversity is a source of great pride for Hilario and his family. It’s also his calling card in the marketplace.

“Eighty-five varieties of chilies, 45 different summer squashes, 15 different winter squashes, 10 corns, eggplants . . .” Hilario had rattled off this list, unprompted, when I first called him to arrange our visit.

While Hilario expounds on the remarkable scope of his operation, I am thinking how remarkable it is that he is even standing here in his own fields, planted with his personal vision. In this country, almost all the hoeing and harvesting and milking and pruning are done by Hispanic people, many of whom risk their lives to travel illegally across the border, like Hilario did, to grow nourishment for a nation that will no longer work in the fields. I consider the absurdity of a policy that guards the borders to keep out the very people who produce our food. I imagine what would happen if the borders really were sealed and if all those who had crossed illegally were removed. Food would go unharvested, cows unmilked, and eggs uncollected. I imagine, instead, what would happen if these workers were welcomed and respected for their contribution, and encouraged to expand on their expertise and imagination.

The Alvarez pepper field is like some kind of out-of-control block party. Eighty-five varieties, most hot and many from Hilario’s own seed, collide in an eight-acre burlesque of color and shape.

There is humor in this field, a former migrant farm-worker’s subconscious commentary on the ultralinear, monocultural, totally predictable fields of America’s industrial agriculture.

I tell Hilario he is crazy, that I’ve never seen anything like this before, that he should quit harvesting peppers and open the field up as a seasonal museum. I imagine docents giving tours, stopping to discuss the history and culture and use of certain varieties, the arrangement of color and shape, what the farmer was going through in his life when he planted this section or that, as if they were standing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, analyzing a Matisse or a van Gogh. But, even as I picture this, I can’t imagine how Hilario’s exuberance could possibly be contained for contemplation or analysis.

Hilario’s 80-year-old mother, Necolasa, and his 85-year-old father, Antonio, sit behind the house under an umbrella with a freezer box, two barbecues, and a battery charger, carefully removing the green husks from piles of corn in preparation for a day of tamale making.

Boxes are stacked everywhere, all full of a dizzying array of variously colored, shaped, and sized chilies, tomatoes, and eggplants. Behind the main refrigeration and loading area, a cluster of plum trees provides shade to a group of women and children making wreaths out of chilies. They work late into the night, using a single halogen spotlight jerry-rigged on a makeshift stand. A small electric grill sits on a nearby table, hot and active from early morning to late into the night roasting chilies, heating beans and tortillas.

I get the sense that from early spring until winter, this is a round-the-clock operation. I see the shadows of men harvesting by moonlight, the white of their plastic buckets marking their movements in the dark.

Maybe this urgency is the work ethic of someone who once had nothing. In Mexico, Hilario made five dollars a day working in a feedlot. Now, he owns his own land, he’s built his own house, and he employs more than a hundred people, growing just about everything he can think of.

For Hilario it is all irresistible, reaching out eagerly into the universe, where he can never gather enough in, never try enough experiments, never grow enough varieties and colors and shapes. I remember when I felt that way myself, when I wanted to try everything, touch everything, and express myself in vivid and unmistakable abundance. Hilario’s world is an immigrant’s dream, where anything is possible.

As a full moon rises, it is finally time to eat the tamales. The process took all day, a carefully executed ritual from the harvest of the corn and the husking and grading and removal of the kernels to the grinding and filling of the husks.

Hilario and his two brothers, his grandson, and a nephew sit around the kitchen table with Aaron and me. The women either work in the kitchen or watch a Spanish soap opera that blares on the TV. Each time we finish a tamale, another mysteriously appears on our plates. There will be no refusal here. We eat them with fresh chili salsa and a little sour cream. When I ask Hilario’s mother what’s in the tamales, she looks at me with surprise and says, “Puro maíz! No mas,” in a tone that says, “Why would we need to add anything else?”

Aaron and I are stuffed from the late-night tamale orgy. We exchange glances and signal each other that it’s time to leave. I thank Hilario and his family for their hospitality. He offers us a stern warning: “Do not go to bed on a full stomach.” We take his advice and walk the perimeter of the farm several times. As we walk, we scan the flat, sandy, moonlit fields intently, searching for glints of color or infrared heat emanating from the peppers, imagining in their unseasonal company that summer could have just begun.

Michael Ableman is a farmer, educator, and founder and executive director of the Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens where he farmed from 1981–2001. He is the author and photographer of From the Good Earth (Abrams, 1993), On Good Land (Chronicle Books, 1998), and most recently Fields of Plenty: A Farmer’s Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It (Chronicle Books, 2005). He is currently farming on an island in British Columbia with his wife and two sons. For more information visit fieldsofplenty.com.

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Hudson Valley Orchards Welcome Visitors to Pick the Crop

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farmer for a dayWhat’s the best apple?

“It’s the one you’ve just picked,” says Dave Fraleigh, the sixth generation Fraleigh to grow apples at Rose Hill Farm in Red Hook. No, not that Red Hook—we’re in a town up in Dutchess County where there have been heated discussions about whether macouns or jonalicious make better pies. Rose Hill, founded in 1798, is one of the many orchards in the Hudson Valley where visitors can pick ripe fruit off the trees and enjoy a bucolic rural experience less than two hours from downtown Brooklyn.

Even the most carefully harvested, stored, and handled fruit cannot compare with one plucked from the branch at its peak of ripeness. Although local orchards are able to store apples for year-round sales, apple harvest is right now, and the orchards of Ulster and Columbia counties are heavy with them.

The harvest began at the end of August with the colorful, juicy, crisp Sansa, a cross between a Japanese Akane and New Zealand Gala, and will go through early November with the hearty Braeburn (great for applesauce) and the good-for- long-keeping, crunchy Cameo.

New York is a major apple-growing state, second only to Washington in domestic apple
production, with Hudson Valley orchards producing about eight million bushels of fruit annually. The New York apple crop had its start on what is now the corner of Manhattan’s Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street when the New Netherlands Governor Peter Stuyvesant planted an apple tree. Settlers moving north into the Hudson Valley planted trees which bore fruit prized more to taste great and keep well than cosmetic perfection. The apples bore names that reflected their region and appearance, like Black Gilliflower, a dessert apple that when fully ripe is nearly black, and the Roxbury (or Golden) Russet, a late and hardy golden fruit with dark brown spots that keeps well through the winter.

Like people, apples reproduce sexually, so if you plant a seed you’ll get a brand new individual that may or may not bear many physical characteristics of its parents. Most trees grown from seed (“pippins”) are unpalatable, which is why modern orchards instead plant cuttings. Every named apple is grown from cuttings that can be traced back to a single pippin that hit the taste jackpot. At least five hundred varieties of apples that were beloved a century ago were pippins first grown in New York State, although average Americans sample only six varieties during their lifetimes. It’s doubtful that any of them could find a place on today’s supermarket shelves where appearance is all that matters. “We can’t sell apples unless they are perfectly round and red,” says Russ Bartolotta whose family picks more than 130,000 bushels of apples a year, most of which are sold “wholesale” (to middlemen for resale).

The domestic apple industry is under siege. A global overproduction of apples, with imports of cheap apple-juice concentrate from China, has depressed the juice market so much that many growers let their fruit rot on the ground. Lucky for you, small farms near New York City have responded by instead selling their crop direct to the public. There are two apple belts in the Hudson Valley: southern Ulster County on the west side of the river and northern Dutchess and Columbia Counties on the east. At these orchards you won’t see the romantic, high-flowering, sheltering boughs that most of us associate with apple trees we drew in grade school. Most growers have replaced these old trees with smaller trees that bear more fruit that is easier to pick.

Scores of orchards welcome the public to grab a basket and head into the trees to “pick your own,” and the entire Valley can feel like one big fruit festival. Each week new varieties are ready for harvest. Parents lay tarps beneath trees and shake them. Fruit falls to the earth while  children race around to avoid getting pummeled. Cosmetically imperfect apples are bound for the cider press and farmers sell the sweet stuff by the cup, jug or, if you’re lucky, as the defining ingredient in fresh cider donuts.

A few places have amusement parks with mazes and petting zoos. Others are just about enjoying the fruit and the scenery. A good place to begin is hudsonvalleyvoyager.com, a new web site that lists farms, orchards, and markets, and links to those that have web sites (remember this is the country—not everyone is internet equipped here).

Some of my favorite places to pick fall fruit in the valley include:

Rose Hill (just off Route 9 in Red Hook—in the Hudson Valley, not Brooklyn—845-758-9221) The Fraleighs grow a wide variety of apples in discreet blocks of trees, each named for a particular piece of land or specific occasion. There’s the Swamp Block, the Summerhouse Block, and the ‘84 Block, which commemorates the year Dave Fraleigh and his wife Karen were married. “If we haven’t got it, you don’t want it,” says Dave Fraleigh, talking about the Rose Hill varieties. This is a no-frills orchard which gets by more than passably on the beauty of the site. It is also where I tasted my very first apple right off a tree and I can remember the drippy sweet crunch to this day. There are pumpkins to pick as well and if Karen is selling her pies, take my advice and buy one.

Mead Orchards is a few miles up the road from Tivoli, a funky, time-seemed-to-stop village. Established in 1916, the picturesque orchard is now run by Sid and Beth Mead and their son Chuck and his wife Linda. Until a few years ago, the family sold apples wholesale but, squeezed by competition from ever-larger industrialized farms stateside and worldwide, they realized that to stay in business they would have to change direction. They have been removing their “industry standard” varieties (suited for supermarkets) and replacing them with varieties more popular with local customers. “We took out Romes and a lot of McIntosh,” says Beth Mead, “and are planting Galas, Honeycrisp and some Japanese strains.” In addition to cider and homegrown vegetables, visitors can often buy specialty Caribbean crops including Jamaican pumpkins grown by Austin Thomas and Nathanioneal Foster, two of their seasonal helpers from Jamaica.

Greig Farm (227 Pitcher Ln., Red Hook, 845.758.1234). The third most popular tourist site in Dutchess County (after the Franklin Roosevelt and Vanderbilt mansions). Just fifteen years ago 90 percent of the farm’s income came from wholesale apple sales. Now 90 percent comes from selling direct to the public, and Norman Greig runs a program of activities that includes a six-month season of pick-your-own and seasonal celebrations. “People used to come pick one hundred pounds of berries,” says Norman. “No one does that anymore. It takes three times as many customers to sell the same amount of fruit as we did ten years ago. The only way we can continue is to keep figuring out ways to get people to the farm.”

The farm is home to the new Gigi Market where there are picnic tables in addition to eat-in facilities and you can buy a variety of take-out sandwiches and prepared foods made from ingredients from local farms.

Montgomery Place Orchards. Talia Fincke and her husband Doug sell their heirloom (that’s right people, tomatoes aren’t the only heirlooms) apples in addition to better-known commercial varieties. This is the place to sample the Esopus Spitzenburg, rumored to be Thomas Jefferson’s favorite apple, and the Newtown Pippin, the oldest commercially grown variety in the United States, first grown from a chance seedling in what is now Queens. In addition to their own fruit, Doug and Talia sell vegetables and dairy products from other small, local farmers. This is one of the most pleasant places to shop in the valley. Adam might be behind the counter, taking names of people who want eggs from his hens. Caroline and Talia might be in back sorting fruit, and Doug appears carrying baskets from the fields. This is a family that knows and loves their fruit and the enthusiasm is contagious. Listening to Talia describe an unex- pected crop of late berries is to understand the real connection between the pleasure of eating and the source of food.

If you’re here on a Sunday, visit the Rhinebeck Farmer’s Market, (East Market St. parking lot from 10 a.m.–2 p.m.). It’s the largest in the Hudson Valley and local farmers sell the freshest local produce, meats, poultry, cheese, prepared foods and baked goods.

Wilklow Orchards is the orchard most beloved by Brooklynites; Fred and his family are superstars at the Borough Hall and Fort Greene Greenmarkets. The Wilklows have been farming just outside New Paltz for six generations, and every fall they open up the whole farm, including the pumpkin patch and 50 acres of apples, to visitors. For children who tire of picking, there is a hay jump, hayrides and a small petting zoo, but even on the busiest days you can find a picnic table in a quiet corner of the orchard, which has mountain views that showcase the stunning fall colors. The Wilklows press their own cider on the farm, but best of all is the cider donuts when they’re still hot.

Stone Ridge Orchards (Route 213, Stone Ridge, 845.687.2587, stoneridgeorchard.com)
Getting here is as much fun as being here, as some of the area’s most spectacular scenery is on the way. The two-hundred-year-old orchard was revitalized in 1984 by Mike Biltonin who holds a master’s in pomology from Cornell and is one of the area’s leading spokespeople on sustainable farming. This is a real country orchard with a farmstand and picnic tables under a huge oak tree. Weekend hayrides.

The post Hudson Valley Orchards Welcome Visitors to Pick the Crop appeared first on Edible Brooklyn.

Market Relics

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market relicsIt started four years ago when I bought a new scanner. The first thing I scanned was a piece of fish I’d bought at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket. After that I made it a habit to get a really good picture of my Greenmarket purchases every Saturday, so I’d have a record of the seasonal changes.

Everything in every photo came from the Greenmarket. Although I’m just an amateur cook and terrible at shopping (I never plan ahead), I’m sort of obsessed with the Greenmarket. I brag to my friends when I manage to cook a meal with 100 percent Greenmarket content.

See other scans at moonmilk.com.

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Heirloom: Notes From a Tomato Farmer

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stark
Tim Stark’s heirloom tomatoes are famous at the Union Square Greenmarket and a perennial fixture on the menus of many celebrated restaurants. But his farm has roots in Brooklyn, as he explains in this excerpt from his new memoir.

An unsustainable writer’s life—hunkered down at a desk on the top floor of a Brooklyn brownstone—proved to be the soil in which the farmer within me took root. Out on Flatbush Avenue one wintry March evening, pacing and frothing over poverty, injustice and those politely worded rejection letters quarterlies dispense the way banks hand out toasters, I came upon a trash dumpster loaded with basement scraps: water pipes, furring strips, two by fours studded with nails. From these scraps, I saw in a flash of insight, I could construct a seed germination rack. In the gardening catalogs, a deluxe seed-starting kit, complete with full spectrum light, shelving and soil heating mats, costs about $800. Which I didn’t have.

What I did possess—or so I fancied—was a farmer’s resourcefulness. Four years earlier, I’d started a vegetable garden on land I’d grown up on in Pennsylvania. Road trips to my garden in a battered Toyota pickup kept my landlord and me seasonally flush in tomatoes and pesto. I had never given serious thought, until this moment, to expanding. It was an idea so impractical it bordered on fiction. Most everything I planted—peas, lettuce, carrots, beans, sweet potatoes, beets—got chewed down to nubs by deer and groundhogs. Whether these fur-bearing gourmands were susceptible to primitive superstitions about nightshades, I don’t know, but come August, you’d look at my garden and think the only thing I planted was tomatoes. The vines strafed the basil and thyme, shaded the sun-loving peppers and strangled the zucchini that, only weeks earlier, armed with baseball bat-sized fruit, had conquered the same ground.

As for the tomatoes plumping up on those vines, some looked more like peaches, pears, lemons and Cinderella pumpkins. There were purple, white, pink and green orbs whose rich, acidic juices colonized the canker sores that throbbed in my mouth until my addiction petered out each September. This jungle of sumptuous, mismatched love apples had its origins in winter days spent poring over the annual yearbook of the Seed Saver’s Exchange, a phone book-like compilation of heirloom seeds offered for a small fee by the gardeners, master and amateur, without whom the tomato would be red for eternity. Cherokee Purple, Green Zebra, Garden Peach, Plum Lemon, Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter. I could not help noticing how these tomatoes responded to me in ways that women, bosses and literary editors never had.

It took five trips to drag my lumber and water pipes up three flights to my apartment. I bought cheap shop lights and hung them from the water pipes an inch above seeded trays. A week later, my writer’s garret was home to 3,000 fledgling tomatoes, tightly organized in labeled rows, stretching toward fluorescent bliss.

Alas, you can’t file away 3,000 tomato seedlings like another so-so draft. I had always replenished my writer’s war chest with freelance consulting gigs, so, to support my tomatoes, I took on a consulting job that required frequent trips to Albany. When the seedlings outgrew the four trays in which they were crowded together, I spent a weekend potting them up into individual plugs, which meant now I had to accommodate 40 plug trays. I bought more lights—enough to satisfy the photosynthetic needs of half my seedlings—and put the tomatoes on two 12-hour shifts. Since a sliver of light will keep a seedling awake until it keels over of insomnia, I went out to the street and hauled home four refrigerator-size boxes so the slumbering trays could be placed in pitch darkness.

I was keeping farmer’s hours now, especially when I had to catch the 6 a.m. train to Albany. Up at 4:30 to put my tomato seedlings through the Chinese fire drill, transferring the sleepers from the boxes to the fluorescent lights, bedding down the ones that had been up all night, watering and inspecting, readjusting my circulation fans and checking the chile peppers germinating on heat mats. Another Chinese fire drill when I got home in the evening. My bedroom was a humid microcosm, bugs helicoptering, the damp smell of tomato musk everywhere.

City life agreed with my tomatoes. Unharried by the elements, their first brush with adversity came on an April day when I carried them up to the roof. The real sun was no 40-watt bulb. The seedlings nearly wilted to death. For two weeks, I spent every free moment weaning them from the fluorescent lights, hauling them onto the roof, then back down when the wilting started. Adaptation to the sun brought with it a burst of growth: my seedlings needed larger containers. The rooftop was big enough to hold 90 trays but I needed to construct cold frames to protect the seedlings from the April weather. My landlord intervened when I found a dumpster full of windows for cold frames. This is a landlord who, during lean months, had kindly accepted tomatoes and zucchini in lieu of rent. Concerned, and for good reason, that the windows of my cold frames would take flight in the wind, he evicted my tomatoes.

Two trips in my Toyota pickup brought all the seedlings to my boyhood home in Pennsylvania, where I laid claim to a couple acres of shaly ground and tracked down an old high school classmate who managed to start up the Ford 8N tractor that had sat unused for 15 years. The only labor I could afford was pro bono, so I convinced all my friends who were doctors and lawyers that it would be fun to come out to the country for a weekend and help transplant two acres of seedlings with garden trowels. From there, my first season as a farmer unfolded as if the inverse of Murphy’s Law was at work. Although I had no irrigation, the clouds delivered almost every week. When buyers at the local produce auction refused to bid on my gangly, multicolored misfits, the Union Square Greenmarket offered me space. And so, back to that beautiful mosaic of a city they went, these upstarts with the quirky immigrant names: Black Krim, Extra Eros Zlatolaska, German Johnson, Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Zapotec Pleated, Rose de Berne.

The rest of that first season is a frenetic blur of pulling weeds and picking tomatoes and begging people—my parents, friends, neighbors, anyone—to help me pick tomatoes.

And hawking tomatoes. Pulling into Union Square in the morning, late from having picked until dark, I would brace myself for the relentless questions. Because I was practically subsisting on the tomatoes myself—there was no time for a sit-down meal—the descriptions came literally off the tip of my tongue: Yellow Brandywine’s nectarine-rich sweetness, Cherokee Purple’s winy acidity, Green Zebra’s salty tang, White Wonder’s appeasing mildness. Trusting more to their own instincts, the chefs grabbed empty tomato boxes, climbed aboard the truck and rummaged away in an urban version of pick-your-own. When I was splitting at the seams with abundance—the overloaded Toyota blew a clutch and I rented a box truck, which the tomatoes ably filled—Charles Kiely and Sharon Pachter, who today run the Grocery restaurant on Smith Street, spread the word. The truck buzzed with chefs. I sold out every time.

As the season wore on, though, I began to feel toward this lucky crop the way a father might feel toward an onerous brood of children, wearily anticipating the day the last spoiled brat gets hauled off to college. I remember the Friday evening my girlfriend and I came into the city to deliver tomatoes. We were muddy and worn out from picking and hadn’t eaten since breakfast. There were the added aggravations you’d expect on the most humid evening of summer: A grocer who groused about how “tomatoes are in the dog house.” Two parking tickets. A maître d’ who blocked my passage when I tried to sneak a delivery through the dining room during service. Restaurants had yet to discover how a reputation for seasonal purity might be clinched by a filthy farmer waltzing 50 pounds of just-picked tomatoes between crowded tables and into the kitchen.

On the way uptown with the final delivery, we got snagged in gridlocked traffic and I felt a tremendous urge to pull a Jackson Pollock with my remaining tomatoes, to yank the stems out like hand grenade pins and pulp the white van wedged in front of me.

“To the dog house with all of them,” I announced. “I will never grow tomatoes again!”

When we finally made it to the last drop off, at Restaurant Daniel, Alex Lee, the chef de cuisine, helped us carry the tomatoes into the kitchen. When Alex introduced us to Daniel Boulud, the chef looked us over and promptly said, “let me give you something to eat.”

“A quick bite sounds great,” I said, thinking of all the tomatoes waiting to be picked at the crack of dawn.

“Here, there is no such thing as a quick bite to eat,” Daniel explained as a table was set in the kitchen for us. We must have been the most bedraggled, homeless-looking specimens on the Upper East Side. I sat down and rose again, thinking this time of my truck parked at an expiring meter. “Don’t worry,” Alex said, heading outside with quarters.

Back in Brooklyn, when I wanted someone else’s cooking, it was invariably to Tom’s or Two Toms that I went. Tom’s was a block from where I lived, on Washington Place, a jamming breakfast joint where Gus always greeted you at the door, and your omelet or your walnut pancakes were washed down by one of those effervescences for which the borough is famous: an egg cream, a lime rickey. At Two Toms on Third Avenue, every table but yours would be committed to some lively softball league banquet and you either selected one of the mile-wide pork chops being served to the joke-cracking banqueteers or you accepted whatever calamari Mom was cooking up in the back kitchen. A good choice either way.

But Restaurant Daniel was like nothing I had eaten in my life. My farmer’s appetite rendered me callous to the task of remembering the seven courses and the wines. I mopped up every drop of every sauce until every plate reflected my week’s growth of whiskers.

I do remember a clear, lemon-tinted soup made from the freshly squeezed juices of taxi tomatoes. At the bottom of the bowl, a tiny wild Mexican tomato glimmered like a fathomless ruby.

Hey! Those were my tomatoes!

Never again? I say that every October. And every March, I drag out the dumpster-inspired germination rack that moved to Pennsylvania with me. For 10 years, now, I’ve made a living from tomatoes. It’s not a bad life. I still don’t own a farm, but I have my own tractor.

And that landlord who gave my tomatoes the boot? He works for me.

Copyright © 2008 by Tim Stark. From the book Heirloom: Notes From an Accidental Tomato Farmer by Tim Stark, published by Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

It took five trips to drag the lumber and pipes up the three flights to my apartment. A week later, my walk-up was home to 3,000 fledgling tomatoes, tightly organized in labeled rows, stretching toward fluorescent bliss.

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Fall 2008

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EB 11 COVER

Amidst all the recent chatter of elections and economic bailouts, there’s been a lot of talk about the anti-Wall Street: Main Street. While pundits and politicos might intend to invoke the family-owned businesses of Mayberry or at least Mobile, one need only cross the river from that beleaguered stock exchange to find mom and pop shops alive and well.

Though Brooklyn’s only street called Main is a modest two-block stretch in DUMBO, this issue abounds with profiles of burgeoning borough businesses from Van Brunt Street to Metropolitan Avenue. And while our nation’s commerce falls prey to multinational brands complete with outsourcing and inferior ingredients, senior executives in these parts tend to have titles like “grandma”—which brings a whole new meaning to the term “parent corporation.” At Red Hook’s the Good Fork, a mother-daughter kimchi duo pack pickled slaw into the wee hours. At Midwood fructose fantasy land the Orchard, a father and son source the world’s best fruit, and price it accordingly.

In Gowanus, brothers keep their grandfather’s pasta die business a well-oiled machine. And in Williamsburg, an uncle-nephew team run a fortune cookie factory while a husband and wife keep the home fires burning under BBQ.

While banks beg for bailouts, entrepreneurial Brooklynites establish edible enterprises. From the nation’s best falafel to a lawyer-operated occasional restaurant to crap-free tonic water and a legacy club’s makeover, innovation is the mom and pop of invention.

As the days grow shorter, our “Main Street” remains sunny. But, hey, if it all goes belly up, at least we’ll be able to dine on squirrel, harvest ginkgoes from our sidewalks, and sweeten our lives with rooftop honey.

Alicia Tate’s homage to salt. 

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Truck Farmer

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truckI first heard about Ian Cheney’s mobile farm on Twitter. Next, I caught a glimpse when it made a Carroll Gardens cameo at a party to benefit young farmers. Then, over in Red Hook, I finally had the chance to feast my eyes: I showed up just as Cheney was pulling a U-turn on Van Brunt Street to catch some sun for the farm, which grows in the bed of his ’86 Dodge Ram pickup. Part CSA, part documentary, part pure automobile, the truck farm was on a roll.

A few years back when Cheney and chum Curt Ellis were filming their feature film King Corn, Old Faithful—that’s the name for the Dodge, a hand-me-down from Grandpa upon graduation from college—loyally ferried the crew cross-country. When Cheney decided to settle in the city a year ago, he considered letting the aging vehicle go, but it takes much more than alternateside parking to come between a man and his Ram.

Cheney had caught the farming bug and soon his truck was infected too: With help from his brother, a poet with experience building green roofs, he drilled drainage holes in the truck’s bed, laid down a water-absorbent mat and topped it with Gaia soil made from recycled Styrofoam. (It weighs next to nothing yet still provides a root structure for crops—just the thing for a farm on wheels.) A layer of compost polished off the truck’s terroir, then Cheney set about planting seeds he’d sent away for from Seed Savers in Iowa.

The interns across the street at Added Value donated heirloom tomato plants, and with the help of a “very friendly physicist,” the filmmaker fashioned solar panels on the roof of the cab to power a digital camera that snaps a pic of the plot every five minutes and posts it online.

Six weeks later, the nasturtiums were a fragrant decoration, the arugula was nice and spicy and the tomato vines had grown so tall they were covering the lens. “I don’t think I could feed myself for a year out of my pickup,” admits Cheney, “but it feels better than buying greens from 3,000 miles away.”

King Corn,” admits Cheney, was somewhat of a downer: an exploration of a “really bad food system. It’s nice to come back with such a positive follow-up.” He plans to interview others planting crops in creative milieus—in windows and tree pits, on boats and roofs. “We want to show how rewarding it is to grow food in unusual places.”

A $20 share in the CSA promises members a copy of the finished Truck Farm DVD, an invite to the farm’s summer picnic, and unpredictable amounts of produce.

“I don’t even call it the truck anymore,” says Cheney, “I say, ‘I’m going out to the farm.’”

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Local Grains Gain Ground

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There’s something simple and comforting about a bag of flour. Plunging one’s fingers into its cool, dry softness is a nostalgic pleasure, and one that is always reassuringly consistent.

That’s because pretty much every bag of flour is exactly the same—all-purpose, indistinguishable, interchangeable—and has been for a century. Across the country, it’s the same nondescript flour we powdered our kitchen counters with as children in those first attempts at making cookies. The same we whisk into Sunday morning pancake batters, bake into blueberry muffins and knead into pizza doughs. And, for many of us, it’s that same battered paper bag that’s been sitting on the shelf for a year.

But these days, educated eaters are losing their appetites for anonymous commodities; clued-in cooks prefer specialty specimens over consistency and shelf stability. Which is why some local-food advocates are arguing that it’s high time to rethink that unassuming white powder from the Great Plains of the Midwest—that a truly viable New York food system must grow its own grain.

“Grain is such a basic commodity,” says Erick Smith, one of the farmers who started Farmer Ground Flour, an upstate mill that began producing flours from local grain in 2008. “When you really think about a regional food market, what’s more basic than grain? If it’s missing, it’s just a hole in the notion that you can have a regional food system. It’s the heart of our food system.”

In the 18th century, New York was the region’s breadbasket, producing wheat for consumption here and in neighboring states. But as canal and railroad systems allowed for long-distance transport, cheap grain rolled in from the large, flat farms in the Midwest, and the small community mills dotting the Hudson Valley crumbled. Today some farmers are working to rebuild the Empire State’s grain industry, following the lead of farmers resurrecting local grain economies across the country, from New Mexico to Pennsylvania.

But plugging local wheat into a system designed to receive it from the West is more complicated, it turns out, than building a local market for heirloom tomatoes, organic milk or even grassfed beef. The generational knowledge of growing grain on our terrain has been lost. New York is no longer home to regional mills that clean, de-hull and grind grain. And, despite today’s farm-to-table sensibilities, local flour is a hard sell.

Even farmers market mavens who seek out kabocha squash and Seckel pears are typically innocent of the nuances of high-quality, stone-ground wheat flour—and those who buy a bag might find baking with it a challenge. One batch of regional flour often varies from another in gluten content, water absorption and texture. Small-batch stone-ground flours, with their quirks and variations, their slightly oily textures and their musky, unfamiliar fragrances, can be tricky for bakers raised on the consistent, mass-produced flour that has made precisely calibrated baking recipes the norm. And, for professional bakers, inconsistent supplies of local grain have made bulk production difficult.

But against all these odds, New York’s grain industry is experiencing a renaissance. Growers are experimenting with specialty grains, which are in turn showing up in farmers markets, bakeries and restaurants. A grain tasting organized by Greenmarket and the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) at the French Culinary Institute in January drew a Who’s Who of the city’s baking elite—including representatives from Roberta’s and Hot Bread Kitchen.

June Russell, who manages farm inspections, strategic planning and regulations for the Greenmarket, was the force behind that tasting, and she says local grains are gaining ground. Cayuga Pure Organics, the beans and grains company started by Erick Smith and his partner, Dan Lathwell, has expanded rapidly into local grains and flours. The two partnered with another area farmer and a young miller to start their flour mill, Farmer Ground Flour, in Trumansburg, New York. Since June 2009, wheat, buckwheat and rye flours have been on sale at their Greenmarket stalls, as well as corn meals, polentas and whole grains such as emmer, barley and oats—all grown upstate. In Brooklyn, their flours and grains are available at Greenmarkets in Fort Greene, Grand Army Plaza and McCarren Park on Saturdays and at the Carroll Gardens Greenmarket on Sundays.

“Chances are, we’re going to sell everything that can be grown this year, which is fantastic,” Russell says. “That signals to the growers that there’s a demand for it.”

For years, New York’s farmers have been skeptical about the possibility of growing high-quality wheat in our wet, unpredictable climate. But individuals bucking that conventional wisdom today say that when it comes to wheat, quality isn’t the same as quantity or uniformity.

“The skepticism wasn’t ‘you can’t grow wheat.’ The skepticism was ‘you can’t grow a uniform product,'” Smith explains. “It will be different in a dry year than a wet year. Nobody says you can’t grow it here, but you can’t grow it to meet the standards of U.S. agriculture, that it’s uniform every year.”

Klaas Martens, who has been growing organic grains with his wife, Mary Howell-Martens, on their Finger Lakes farm for over a decade, echoes this sentiment. “I think we’ve bought into a false definition of quality with the industrial food system, and that quality is uniformity,” he says. “With uniformity you bring up the worst, but you also eliminate excellence.”

For home bakers used to the consistency of supermarket commodities, the fluctuations of small-batch flours require a flexibility that many of us are uncomfortable with. Instead of slavishly relying on exact recipes, local flours force us to observe the texture, consistency and pliability of a dough, adding water or adjusting the yeast as necessary. This way of baking is a long-forgotten skill, and can be off-putting for some.

But the variations in local grains, once you’ve learned to work with them, are precisely what make them worth the trouble. The mass-produced Midwestern wheat in supermarket flour is grown for yield, not flavor. It’s roller-milled to chalky shelf-stability, stripping it of all the wheat germ and fibrous bran that can give flour its character and nutritional value, then sifted and mixed to precise gluten levels. When local farmers grow heirloom grains and grind them in small batches, the product is as different from that supermarket bag as a juicy Green Zebra tomato is from a pale, spongy supermarket tomato.

“You cannot compare it at all,” says Albano Ballerini, the chef and owner of Aliseo Osteria del Borgo on Vanderbilt Avenue. Ballerini also uses whole-grain wheat flour from Wild Hive Farm in Clinton Corners, New York, to add flavor to his pasta, mixing in an organic semolina flour for springiness. The variable nature of the local flour requires some extra attention, he says, but that’s a part of his cooking process anyhow.

“You go by the texture,” he says. “We check the density, we touch the pasta, and when it’s the right texture, that’s when we stop . . .We don’t work with standardized recipes, we don’t work with books. It’s the real thing.”

Ballerini also makes polenta with a combination of coarse and fine-ground cornmeal from Wild Hive, an operation run by Hudson Valley baker Don Lewis, who has stone-ground his own local grain, mostly from nearby Lightning Tree Farm, for a decade. Lewis sells flours, cornmeals and baked goods at his bakery and café in Clinton Corners, through a CSA upstate and wholesale to several chefs in New York City.

“American commodity [cornmeal] doesn’t have flavor,” Ballerini explains. “You have to put butter in there, you have to oversalt it, you have to doctor it up. To me, there is no comparison.” Ballerini uses a double-boiler to cook the upstate-grown polenta with water and salt for three or four hours. Then he serves it with braised local mushrooms or crumbled sausages and Pecorino. “It’s just fantastic,” he raves, admitting he sometimes downs it nearly straight. “I love to eat it just with some olive oil and cracked black pepper on top. That’s my favorite way.”

At the Brooklyn Kitchen, which sells Farmer Ground Flour as well as Daisy Flour, an organic pastry flour from Pennsylvania, the unfamiliar grains and variable nature of the flours can present a challenge for customers, says co-owner Harry Rosenblum. That’s part of why baking classes at the Brooklyn Kitchen Labs try to wean participants off complete reliance on recipes, he says.

“Yes, there’s a recipe but, especially with bread-baking, there’s a feel to it,” says Rosenblum. There’s nothing new about this approach, he points out—it’s exactly how his Hungarian grandmother baked before standardized flour became the norm. And it’s not all that complicated, either. He adds: “If you find your dough is a little too sticky, add a little more flour. And if your dough is a little too dry, add water.”

A bigger challenge of baking with Northeast flour is its lower gluten level. Area farmers have had success growing soft wheat, the variety traditionally grown here, which is preferred for pastries, pancakes and cookies. In our climate, however, it’s more difficult to grow so-called hard wheat, whose higher levels of gluten give yeasted bread its structure, producing the big air bubbles we’ve come to love in our loaves.

Despite the conventional wisdom that New York’s soil and climate can only support soft wheat, some New York farmers—many of whom started out growing animal feed for the organic meat and dairy market—now grow the hard wheat favored for bread flour. Just two or three years ago, hardly anyone in the state was growing hard red spring wheat, says Elizabeth Dyck, coordinator of NOFA’s Wheat Project. But now heritage red fife and other hard red spring wheats are gaining ground. This year she worked with farmers together growing 400 acres of organic hard red spring wheat statewide, and she expects an even higher acreage of hard red winter wheat next year. That may not sound like much, but in a state where wheat production has dropped too low to be counted by the federal government, Dyck says, “Those are hard-won acres.”

New York’s hard wheat flour has slightly lower gluten levels— around 12 percent, compared to the 14 percent flours of the Midwest, which are generally considered best for bread. But the strongest retort to arguments that New York can’t grow good bread flour is a slice of the Ultimate Whole Wheat loaf developed by Keith Cohen, owner of Orwasher’s Bakery on the Upper East Side. This domed loaf, which is on sale at Cayuga’s Greenmarket stands in Brooklyn, was inspired by Irish brown bread and features Farmer Ground’s whole-wheat bread flour. It’s rich, nutty and moist, substantial and wheaty without being dense—a brown bread that evokes a farmhouse table rather than a health-food store.

“I’ve always wanted to do it,” Cohen says of baking with local flours. “But for many years there wasn’t a great supply of it. Recently it’s come to the forefront.”

At Roberta’s, the celebrated locavore pizza destination in Bushwick, chefs have incorporated local grains and polentas into the menu, and the bakers use some Farmer Ground Flour in the breads they’re baking in their backyard shipping-container bread oven. It adds flavor to rye and walnut loaves, says Gabe McMackin, the catering and events chef at the restaurant. The challenge, McMackin says, is “trying to work out ways that we can use local flours and keep the breads inexpensive.”

“It’s such a terrific product, but it’s also precious,” he says, acknowledging that small-batch flours cost significantly more than their commodity counterparts. “We’d love to get to a point where we could use a local bleached white flour, but right now it doesn’t make sense to do that, economically. We use what we can for where we are, but we want to get to a place where we can use local grains for all we’re working on.”

No one is more excited about the growing popularity of local grains than Dyck, who has been working for years to revive the region’s wheat industry. But she’s aware that limited processing infrastructure drives prices up and means there’s a lag time before demand can be met. After January’s tasting, a baker asked where he could get 30,000 pounds of a specialty wheat he tasted there. She had to tell him that only one test acre had been grown.

“I don’t want this to be just a flash-in-the-pan fad,” she says, aware that chefs and bakers could lose interest before local production can scale up. “The infrastructural elements still need to be worked out. That takes a little time. I’m hoping demand hangs on.”

A real regional wheat economy will require more than fashionable ideology, says Klaas Martens, the Finger Lakes farmer. Growers have to entice customers to put their money where their mouth is, he says.

“It doesn’t really help to only like the concept,” he says. “You have to have tangible benefits, and they have to be tangible right away.”

With the help of farmers, bakers, and chefs, we may still rediscover one tangible benefit: nuances and depths of flavor that our collective palate has forgotten after decades of industrial flour.

Nathan Leamy, acting director of operations for Slow Food USA, certainly hopes so. He’s something of an expert on wheat, having traveled the world to study how American agricultural policy is affecting bread consumption worldwide, and he also teaches sourdough baking classes at the Brooklyn Kitchen. There he shows students that there’s more to flour than that battered bag of all-purpose on their shelf. He even has them taste different raw flours and discuss each one’s flavor and textural nuances, using words like “earthy,” “nutty,” “chalky” or “almondy.”

Leamy compares these different flours to another crop for which the public’s rediscovered appetite has helped stem the loss of biodiversity: apples.

“There are thousands of different types of apples in the world,” he explains. “You might use one type for making pie and another for making apple sauce and another type as a table apple. We use wheat as if there were only one kind of wheat in the world, because there’s really only one kind of wheat that’s widely available. But there are so many different types of wheat. I think as this develops, that people will be able to say, ‘this is my favorite wheat’ for a particular task.”

And ultimately, bread—that “staff of life”—probably matters more than apples, Leamy points out: “People eat bread a heck of a lot more than they eat apple pie.”

Indrani Sen is a freelance writer, an adjunct professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, and an editor at the Local, a hyperlocal blog covering Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. Her Web site is indraniclips.com.

Flour power: Klaas Martens now grows over 600 acres of corn, buckwheat, spelt, emmer, wheat and oats in Penn Yan, New York.

“Grain is such a basic commodity,” says Erick Smith, one of the farmers who started Farmer Ground Flour, an upstate mill that began producing flours from local grain in 2008. “If it’s missing, it’s a hole in the notion that you can have a regional food system.”

Stellar Starches: In polenta at Aliseo and by the pound at The Brooklyn Kitchen.

Editor’s note:  Aliseo Osteria del Borgo and Wild Hive Farm have closed.

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The Best of the Bunch

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EDIBLE_DAVY-2185

Greenmarket groupies love to debate which farmer has the plushest plums, the hottest habaneros or the finest fennel. But when it comes to grapes, there’s no contest: The Blue Ribbon goes to Ken and Eileen Farnan of Buzzard Crest Vineyards, who grow grapes and grapes alone on their 37 acres way north in the Finger Lakes, bringing nearly a dozen varieties to Union Square Greenmarket from Labor Day until Thanksgiving. (In our opinion, the three shortest months of the year.)

True, other stands will put out a few quarts of plump green Niagaras (which still trump any supermarket Thompson seedless nonsense hands down) or dusty bunches of dark Concords, that powerhouse that evokes Welch’s, the company to which so many of them are sold. But for more than 30 years this grape-growing pair (Eileen was raised on a farm upstate; while Ken’s a Brooklyn boy) have focused on the vine and with very fine results: chefs swear by the Farnans’ fruit. While all the other stands’ grapes look limp as the weeks go by, those at Buzzard Crest stay stellar well into November, thanks to the exacting care with which the Farnans pick and store their harvest haul. (Extra impressive when you consider that 200-mile trip to town gives them one of the longest drives of any farmer at city markets.)

Their stand offers a wondrous assortment of the fruit of the vine, all certified organic, and the lineup of varieties rotates as they ripen on the farm’s steep slopes near Keuka Lake. Some types are bound for Barrington Cellars, the Farnans’ tiny winery, some get squeezed into the best juice you’ve ever tasted, and the rest are sold for snacking or, better still, for a fall afternoon of making grape jelly. Favorites include those famous Concords, as well as Jupiter and Mars, all three deep blue and delicious; the pale green and perfectly tart Niagara; the hard-to-find amber Cacos, grown on just a few acres; crisp green Lakemonts; tiny deep-red Delawares; the green Marquis and the red, semi-spicy seedless Canadice, a native of New York State.

While we’re on the subject of seeds: The Farnans offer grapes with them and without, and all are fantastic, but please bear in mind that most seedless varieties were bred for that convenience, not flavor; the ones with seeds often offer the greater taste sensations. Spitting might not be pretty, but, for three months of the year, your manners-minded friends will just have to look the other way.

Buzzard Crest Vineyards, Saturdays at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket. For a recipe for Sunday Afternoon Lazy Concord Grape Jam made by the editors of this magazine many harvest moons ago, go to ediblebrooklyn.com.

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Ex-Chef Ray Bradley Excels in a Muddy New Field

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Lately the celebrity chef is starting to be supplanted by the celebrity farmer, to the point where “Agrarian Idol” will undoubtedly be headed soon to big screens in home kitchens everywhere. Ray Bradley would be the leading candidate for the premiere episode, but probably no one would scoff harder at the very notion. There could not be a farmer less likely to set boot on the set of a reality show.

Gruff and gray-bearded, he shows up from New Paltz at Grand Army Plaza on Saturdays looking as if he just finished picking his exquisite baby pattypans and hyper-fragrant lemon verbena in a mud storm. To citified eyes, his cap appears encrusted with grime, his jeans could stand up on their own; if his T-shirt is still white everyone remarks on it.

But what he pulls out of his beat-up truck is as Greenmarket-famous as he is: a few dozen eggs from free-range chickens; exceptional pork, bacon and sausage from his Large Black pigs; mud-encrusted heads of hard-neck garlic; bunches of tulips or hydrangeas, and an ever-changing array of rough-looking, intense-tasting vegetables, herbs and berries. Every year he adds more, whether honey or chestnuts or preserves he makes himself.

Unlike so many farmers in the food pages and glossy magazines who boast of planting baby beets to order for top chefs, Bradley grows only what he likes to eat. And while he counts the likes of Dan Barber among his clients, he caters to cooks who do all the sourcing and sautéing themselves, without a cast of thousands. He can advise anyone on what to do with his sorrel or fava beans or pork ribs. As he puts it: “I cook the shit myself.”

Given his un-GQ grooming and no-words-wasted attitude, Bradley, 58, is the unlikeliest choice to be the George Clooney of the Greenmarkets, but he has no end of groupies. Those who know only his produce and products gravitate to his funky stand for unlikely perfection—his torpedo shallots look like something the barn cat dragged in but have phenomenal flavor; his legendary heirloom tomatoes are equal parts misshapen and sublime. Those who want to claim an inside connection will sidle up and tell other shoppers: “You know he was a chef at Bouley….” Plus I’ve met more than one woman who fantasized about moving to the country with this dusty diamond in the rough and been devastated to learn he’s in a long-term relationship, with a Tribeca dweller.

Bradley shuns the mobs at Union Square, instead selling at Grand Army Plaza and a Friday market on West 97th Street in Manhattan. He spurns the white tents and plastic tables that are ubiquitous at Greenmarkets, preferring to set his jewels out on wooden tables and bins with chalked prices on marble slates. He follows organic farming methods but no longer bothers to jump through hoops for the certification that would permit him to use the “O” word (although some of my friends call him “the organic guy” because he looks the part).

And Bradley is not interested in competing with everyone harvesting either predictable corn or trendy pea shoots. He sells one variety of potatoes—Carola—because those are his favorite. He will have haricots verts when every other stall is heaped high with plebeian green beans, the most delicate bunches of lettuce when romaine is busting out all over, callaloo before neighboring stands have spinach. He gets $8 a pound for those shallots, and no complaints about the price. (As one of my neighbors gushed, “Oh, they’ll change your life.”) And his garlic is famous not just for its fat, easy-to-peel cloves and balanced flavor but because so many of his patrons pitched in to help harvest it when he first started growing it.

Bradley’s heirloom tomatoes also have a cult following, for good reason: In peak season he’ll have them in a rainbow of colors, from green to yellow to almost purple-red, laid out on tables like Elizabeth Taylor–sized gemstones. He grows them huge and sweet for slicing raw but also cultivates plum types for cooking and tiny husk tomatoes, or ground cherries, that he seduces shoppers into buying by offering tastes.

His connections with his followers are almost organic. An artist who lives on the Upper West Side, Anne Watkins, painted the watercolors that adorn his barn and hang under his canopy in Brooklyn, depicting his chickens and pigs and his black dog, Gracie. His right-hand man at markets, the charismatic Hardeep Maharawal, was a regular at Grand Army Plaza until Bradley asked him to come to work; the two are believed to have the most awesome facial hair in the Greenmarket network. (The rest of the week the mustachioed Indian works at an accounting firm in Midtown.)

More recently, some of his younger devotees have been working on turning him into a cyber-star, in return for pork and potatoes. Heather and Brad Thomason of the Bad Feather design firm, who are also regulars at Grand Army Plaza, somehow persuaded this digital Neanderthal to let them design a logo and a Web site and maintain an e-mail list to alert customers to what he’ll be bringing to market. To get the information from a guy who wears no watch and owns no computer and even resists the telephone (he has one in his greenhouse), they say they almost need to communicate by smoke signals. Or at least through “the lady I’m with,” Iris Kimberg, who ran a network of physical therapy clinics before selling them for a major profit and who clearly knows from marketing.

This year he is selling pureed winter squash he cooked and froze to prolong the season; before that he started drying peppers to make highly regarded paprika and turning his strawberries into jam and his cucumbers into pickles. This summer he is stag- ing a series of farm-to-table dinners at his spread in New Paltz for 40 people at a time, with wines paired by his friend Daniel Johnnes of Daniel Boulud’s restaurant group.

Bradley acceded to all this uncharacteristic 21st-century promotion because “I’m barely keeping my head above water.” Adding to the costs of planting, cultivating and harvesting his many crops is the huge load of getting them to market: gas, insurance, market fees. And that was especially true after the fungus that wiped out nearly his entire tomato crop two summers ago. He scrambled to plant alternative crops while his cadre of Samaritans designed buttons with his uncharacteristically smiling face on them to sell, although they could not make up for those fields of lost income—or combat his impulse to just hand the buttons out.

As old friend Mara Peteritas, the graphic designer at Bouley, says: “There are not too many people like him. He wants nothing to do with commercial success—he would give food away.” (A writer friend of mine confessed that he kept her fed during a recent barren patch in the freelance life.)

Both the $55-a-head ($75 with wine) farm dinners and his growing line of paprika and pickles are a return to cooking. Bradley and “Dave” Bouley grew up together in Connecticut; his early jobs in food included dishwashing and scooping ice cream. He went to forestry school, but in 1976 moved to Florida with a friend who was a sous-chef and got a job peeling carrots; when the fry cook was fired, Bradley was promoted. He cooked on Shelter Island and at the Polo in Manhattan with Bouley, Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud before teaming up with Bouley at Drew Nieporent’s Montrachet in Tribeca in 1985.

The restaurant got wild reviews right away. Then, Bradley recalls, “Bouley wanted his own place, and Drew found out and canned everybody.” So Bradley went on to help build Bouley’s eponymous restaurant, but he vowed: “‘If this thing turns out like every other restaurant—day in, day out—I’m gonna find something else.’ I wanted to start my own business growing stuff.” He first grew herbs on land in Connecticut, started growing more with a Hudson Valley native named Frank Wilklow (whose brother, Fred, is a star of many Brooklyn Greenmarkets), moved to Costa Rica for a bit and then met Kimberg, who suggested he work for himself.

After a couple of stops and starts, he planted himself near New Paltz on rented acreage and, in 2000, bought his current spread, complete with a falling-down barn. Today the farm looks like him, or at least like one of those carefully calculated wildflower gardens. There is order in the rows of beans, tomatoes, carrots, shallots and hydrangeas, but compared with the precisely squared-off and manicured fields you see from 30,000 feet in flyover country, the place could pass for an overgrown field.

Even the recently renovated barn looks not quite ready for the Times Magazine. He is barn-proud of its new wood and a fresh paint job and that kitchen for canning, but it is clearly a workspace. It does, however, house a sort of wall of fame just inside the entrance, a narrow alcove hung with framed profiles of him from newspapers and magazines. (It seems odd for him to store his mementoes so exposed to the Hudson Valley elements, until he volunteers that he’s a former hoarder who lost it all to arson several years ago, not only personal belongings but restaurant equipment he could really use today. “Now I don’t save nothin’,” he says wryly.)

The farm is just a few minutes’ drive from downtown New Paltz, a serious tourist stop on the Hudson River. There he takes in cats that would otherwise be euthanized by the local vet and raises chickens only for eggs (don’t think about the pigs). His three Mexican farmhands live in a big new trailer he bought for them and head home in November for the winter. He himself “used to quit by Christmas; now I’ve gotta keep the place going—I can’t stop for a couple of months or I won’t survive.”

He lives nearby. When Iris Kimberg comes up from the city, he cooks and she washes dishes. And what’s on the menu? “Mostly meat and potatoes, scallops, pasta.” For seafood, he barters with his friends Alex and Stephanie Villani at Blue Moon, who also sell at Grand Army Plaza.

On Fridays and Saturdays he’s up at 2:30, has the truck loaded by 3:30 and is on the road in time to pull into the city by 5:30. Each day he will turn around and drive all the way back. His routine is well known among his regulars. “Whenever I’m getting ready to go to bed, I remember Ray’s just getting up,” says Jeff Zoldan, an office furniture dealer in Brooklyn for whom Bradley recently revived his forestry-school skills in chopping up a fallen tree.

Despite how scruffy he looks, watch him for a couple of hours and you see what a savvy stylist he is, constantly arranging and tidying. Bundles of gorgeous baby lettuces are laid out in his polished wood bins only a few at a time, the rest kept chilled and crisp in coolers. His signs are all chalk on old roof tiles from his stonemason grandfather’s roof (the front is one season, the back another). And his esthetics are subtle: Other stands may be selling sunflowers, but from dirty plastic buckets. His are in galvanized tin buckets, with only a few bunches at a time on display. Among chefs, Anna Klinger of Al di Là is a regular, and others buy Bradley’s pigs’ feet and hearts. But while restaurants are his past, he avoids making them his livelihood. “Restaurants don’t pay,” he says. “They all want 30 days, 60 days. You gotta have people to keep on ’em.” And the profit margins for chefs would be rather slim on produce priced as high as he needs to sell it.

So he spends his time advising how to use hyssop (in pastis) or answering a question about which of his four types of cucumbers are good in salad (“I like to use them all”). Bradley tells one man to use garlic scapes to make pesto and nods approvingly when he responds: “I grill ’em.”

As Heather Thomason says, “Everyone wants to talk about food because Ray was a chef. Everyone wants to know the chef who’s a farmer.”

For all that “Top Soil” cachet, though, it comes down to what he sells. A neighboring vendor who may remain anonymous put it well, “He’s just like his vegetables: all crusty and dirty on the outside, but you cut them open and they’re amazing.”

Bradley’s exceptional pork and rough-looking, intense-tasting produce are almost as beloved as he is. Hardeep Maharawal was a regular until Bradley asked him to help at the stand; the two are believed to have the most awesome facial hair in the entire Greenmarket network.

Bradley’s heirloom tomatoes have a cult following, for good reason: he offers them in a rainbow of colors, from green to yellow to purple-red, laid out on tables like Elizabeth Taylor–sized gemstones.

Furry farmhand. Bradley’s dog Gracie, above, rides down with him to sell at the Prospect Park Greenmarket each Saturday.

Barn again. Bradley cooked with David Bouley, Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud but traded his toque for a farm near New Paltz. This summer he’ll host a dinner series there.

Photo credit: Michael Harlan Turkell and Etienne Frossard.

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Haute Horticulture

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BEST WAY TO THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX TRUCK

After seeing a friend’s mobile art gallery—outfitted in an 18-foot diesel box truck with completely clear walls—26-year-old Fort Greene resident Nick Runkle had a vision: a greenhouse on wheels that he could drive across country—fueled only by recycled vegetable oil and solar and wind energy, of course—and thus bring the sustainable agriculture gospel to the masses.

Runkle, who grew up in Iowa, called up childhood chum Justin Cutter, 27, who at the time was working at a bio-intensive mini-farm in California. Together they perfected the “Compass Green” greenhouse-on-wheels plan and this spring they launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the $27K to make their dream a reality. In a beguiling video, the two dudes—who could easily have stepped out of a Pendleton for Opening Ceremony ad—describe their plans to drive their fully functional mobile greenhouse to educational institutions across America.

By the end of April, 335 people donated, catapulting Runkle and Cutter past their goal and into mobile greenhouse reality. They wasted no time converting their truck’s engine to run on veggie oil, installing two deep garden beds along each wall, inserting Plexiglass windows into the truck’s sides and roof, and outfitting it with two enormous barrels to catch rainwater, provide irrigation and keep the plants at a regulated temperature. Solar panels on the roof will provide electricity for ventilation, heating pads under the roots, and a projection screen on the side of the greenhouse.

At press time, the duo were growing vegetables in a farm parked curbside in Brooklyn, but by the time you read this they’ll be at large in America, teaching both kids and adults easy, practical steps toward a sustainable future through biointensive sustainable agriculture presentations, greenhouse tours and gardening workshops. Compass Green will visit summer camps, summer programs, parks and farmers’ markets. “It’s remarkable how unifying this project is,” says Runkle.

While the two share experience in agriculture and construction, they’ve happily accepted help from friends and neighbors. Complete strangers—from ranchers in Idaho to teachers in Georgia—have already offered Cutter and Runkle places to stay along the way.

“It’s not at all about us,” says Cutter. “We’re trying to carry something forward that a community of people in Brooklyn—and across the country—are doing for the Earth.”

BEST ACRONYM
Bob Hyland is living proof that you don’t need to be a tattooed 20-something to be an urban farming rock star. The 77-year-old Bay Ridge resident has become a city sensation for spreading the gospel of sub-irrigated planter systems, or SIPs.

“SIPs are not rocket science,” says Hyland, who studied at Cal Poly Graduate School of Environmental Design and ran an interior “plantscaping” company in Los Angeles. “The self-watering containers are more of a plumbing system.”

Hyland says in-ground growing is great—if you’ve got farmland. But SIPs, first developed in Europe and perfect for urbanites, are containers with a twist: Rather than watering them daily, you set up a reservoir at the bottom. Plant roots drink periodic “sips” as the water wicks into the potting mix via capillary action. (Though SIPs are a simplified form of hydroponics—a method of growing plants without soil, using mineral nutrient solutions—Hyland resists the term because of its association with marijuana.)

The EarthBox, a SIP you can purchase readymade, was invented by a Florida farmer in 1992 after 19 inches of rain destroyed his tomato crop. Today Home Depot and Lowe’s sell their own versions, called City Pickers and Patio Pickers respectively, for about $30, but DIY solutions can be built for under $10. Hyland’s blog shows how.

It’s a concept that goes back at least a century. The problem, says Hyland, is education. Or lack thereof.

“Europe is far, far ahead of us in consumer horticulture education. No institutions [here] teach modern methods for growing plants,” Hyland says, clearly exasperated with gardeners who won’t get with the times. “Our horticultural institutions teach only in-ground gardening and drain-hole planters. Clay pots were modern in the time of Egyptian pharaohs.”

When Frieda Lim stumbled upon Hyland’s blog in 2009, her Gowanus rooftop farm plan used traditional containers. But she was won over by SIPs’ promise of greater yields, water conservation and portability. Soon Hyland was consulting—free of charge—as she made 75 SIPs out of Rubbermaid tote boxes.

Last summer Lim’s 225-square-foot Slippery Slope Farm yielded mountains of produce, and this year she’s growing chard, kale, mustards, spinach, zukes, cukes, beets, carrots, hakurei turnips, radishes, goji berries, melons, strawberries, herbs, 16 varieties of tomatoes, eight varieties of peppers, six varieties of beans, and a half dozen basils.

“I can’t think of a more beautiful rooftop garden—right above the F train,” Hyland says proudly.

Slippery Slope isn’t the only convert. Last year, Sixpoint started a rooftop garden using recycled beer kegs, and Hyland and Lim are helping retrofit them into SIPs. (Hyland is also experimenting with how much spent grain from the brewery can be added to the soil mix.) This spring Lim launched a SIP project at Park Slope’s P.S. 39. She and Hyland are working with Melissa Ennen to create a rooftop garden at The Commons on Atlantic Avenue. And they’ve just set up Four & Twenty Blackbirds with SIPs window boxes—the sweet bounty is bound for their signature sodas and pies.

BEST USE OF “PLASTIC WATER BOTTLES” AND “MICHAEL POLLAN” IN THE SAME SENTENCE
Britta Riley kept a saltwater aquarium in her five-story Williamsburg walkup, but it was Michael Pollan’s 2008 Times Magazine essay, “Why Bother?” that inspired her to start growing her own food.

“I had learned a good bit about hydroponics”—the soil-free approach in which plants live on liquid nutrients—“because aquarium-keeping shares so much of the gear,” she explains. “So I started exploring. I quickly learned some of the engineering hurdles that make it capital- and infrastructure-intensive. I thought I’d try to do something in my own space and maximize use of my window light.”

The result was Windowfarms: a compact column of modified plastic bottles that transform any window into a teeming mini tower of urban agriculture. A simple aquarium pump sends water from the bottom bottle to the top, from which it trickles down, from bottle to bottle, through the plants’ roots, burbling like a fountain. Plants grow faster than they would in soil and urban locavores can raise anything from cilantro to collards, reducing the farm-to-table journey to the distance between window kit and kitchen table.

After mastering the system, Riley decided to go pro. She exceeded her $25,000 Kickstarter goal and, drawing upon her experience building websites for the Smithsonian, launched windowfarms.org in August 2009. Since then, 500 Windowfarms kits have been sold (available in two- or four-column systems, they hold 16 or 32 plants and sell for $139.95 or $239.95), and a whopping 19,000 DIYers have downloaded instructions to make their own.

Anti-plastic? Alternative systems are in development. Meanwhile the bottles in Riley’s kits are collected from dumpster dives in city trashcans and recycling facilities, and each one is painted, cut, drilled, packaged and shipped by workers at the nonprofit foundation Mid-Hudson Workshop for the Disabled. Now 34 and living in another five-story South Williamsburg walkup near her store’s shared space with Spacecraft on Bedford between S. Fourth and S. Fifth, Riley insists that there is no such thing as a green thumb.

“I used to say ‘I must have a black thumb; I kill every plant I bring home.’ But just like cooking or riding a bike, caring for plants takes practice, experimentation and a willingness to learn from failure. The reward of having lush healthy life around you can be enough to keep you going once you get the hang of it. Neither magic powers nor folk knowledge passed down from elders are required. All it takes is to keep planting and talking to others who are doing the same.”

Scores of retrofitted Rubbermaid tubs transform a Gowanus rooftop into an urban Eden.

Totes! Frieda Lim planned to use traditional containers on her Gowanus rooftop but she was won over by SIPs’ greater yields, water conservation and portability. Soon Hyland was consulting—free of charge—as she made 75 SIPs out of Rubbermaid tote boxes. This year she’s raising everything from raspberries to turnips.

Photo credit:  Compass Green and Frieda Lim.

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Doing What We Can With What We Got–bk farmyards Puts Backyards into Crop Production

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In case you missed last week’s Edible segment on NY1, we just wanted to give you yet another peek of the fields at Fox Trot Farmyards, a 450-square-foot real, working farm– meaning people pay for its produce–smack in the back of a South Brooklyn backyard. It’s a prototype run by Stacey Murphy and volunteers at bk farmyards, the organization she runs to help schools, community gardens and homeowners turn their unused land into working farms that benefit everyone in Brooklyn. (The “everyone” applies thanks to the way growing things improve soil, water and air quality.)

Among their many projects is a youth training program at an East New York school, and an egg CSA where more than 60 chickens currently roost. But our favorite is Fox Trot, which supplies six CSA members each Friday until November and is being used as a test model by Murphy during the 2011 growing season.

At Foxtrot, homeowner donates the land and water, and in return gets a free CSA share each Friday. They’re also responsible for gathering CSA clients from their community, essentially neighbors and friends who come right to their yard to pick up their tote bags of goods that were literally picked 45 minutes beforehand.

“The idea is that we’re trying to build a sustainable business model,” says Murphy, who teaches a handful volunteers about crop planning, planting and harvesting each Friday, the crew weighing yields of each crop each week on a portable scale. (In total it’s about 30 pounds on average a week, ranging from 20 pounds in spring to 50 right now.) She also tracks what is planted when, how much seedlings cost and the amount of time spent working on the farm. “We measure everything that goes into the site,”  she says, “so that we know if a farmer wanted to farm 12 of these sites that they could sustain a lifestyle in the city…really this year is about training people how to take of backyards so we can increase the amount of food that’s being grown in Brooklyn.”

Note that while all farmers have problems–pests, weather, and so on–one hard part of farming several city plots instead of one large rural one is that you’re not always on site all the time to see worms, overwatering, broken irrigation tubing or fallen stakes as they happen: Murphy currently tries to hit all her projects every other day or so, travelling between them all by bike. Which adds to another key feature of Foxtrot: Most of the farming and CSA equipment on site will fit into a backpack.

Want to see more? Watch the segment about bk farmyards on NY1 right here.

 

 

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A Year—or Two—Farming in Santa Cruz

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Last year, after over a decade in Brooklyn, I moved to California to be part of the legendary apprenticeship program at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz. I was one of 39 apprentices, who ranged in age from 22 to 68. Each year a similar group arrives from all over the world for a full-time, six-month intensive in the hows and whys of organic farming and its place in the larger food system. Collectively, we ran the 100-member CSA and a biweekly market stand on a farm overlooking the ocean.

When I arrived, I brought with me four Meyer lemons, the thing I’d been most proud to have grown. I’d literally spent years coaxing the golden perfumed fruits from a potted tree in my Park Slope apartment. I felt like some kind of Renaissance-era ambassador, with an earnest desire to bring the wonders of my tabletop orangerie to a foreign land. Upon arrival, I was instantly humbled by an entire row of Meyer lemon trees, branches bending under the weight of their own fruit, lining the path to my new tent cabin home.

When I first got here, I felt beset by this kind of largesse. I was unprepared for the transition from a “junior one-bedroom apartment” (a uniquely New York appellation) into living more or less outdoors with a community of 50 other people.

I was overwhelmed by orchards of things that I had never seen attached to a plant before—avocados, kiwis, persimmons. I’d get caught squatting in the field like an animal, furtively stuffing arugula or peas into my mouth, as if they were somehow going to run off before dinner. I canned with a fury that could only be described as apocalyptic (I am, and almost everyone I know is, still working through that batch of green tomato chutney). In Brooklyn, the ringtone on my mobile phone had been a recording of a redwing blackbird, a sweet reminder of a meadow near my childhood home. Now that I had moved next door to a six-acre field, with an enormous flock of resident redwings, I had the harried, distinctly anti-pastoral feeling that my phone was constantly ringing.

We learned a lot from our managers and each other in the farm and garden. We learned a lot from each other in the kitchen, too. Once a month we’d wake at 5:00 in the morning to work in the kitchen, rather than the field. We prepared breakfast, lunch and dinner for a hungry tribe of a hundred strong arms and dirty hands—all on a budget of about $1 per meal per person. There were a lot of lentils. There was a lot of quinoa. There was also a walk-in refrigerator shoulder-deep in produce that practically gleamed, picked from our fields and served hours, even minutes, later.

I fell in love with this farm, as many do, and I stayed on an extra year to teach here.

This season, we are blessed with three apprentices transitioning out of work as professional chefs. I’m writing this in August, a time of typical California Central Coast magic, when we have both summer and fall crops coming on. We fry up tiny padrón peppers and slice into Summer Crest peaches, then pile up early apples and pears for roasting together if the fog rolls in early and the night feels chilly. These are good days in the kitchen.

I work hard and a lot. I wake up every morning to a view of the ocean through an orchard. I still live and work with 50 people. Sometimes I miss sitting alone quietly in my apartment, eating alone in a restaurant without waitstaff shooting me uncalled-for consoling looks, not having to smile automatically at anyone with whom I make eye contact, and having secrets. Mostly, that life seems savage and a little distant. A steady stream of New Yorkers flows through this program, bringing with them just the right amounts of cynicism and Gorilla Coffee.

This winter I’m returning east, and I know that once I get there I’ll be reconciled with New York in time. I predict a lot of soup. For the moment, I’m helping to coordinate harvest for our market stand and trying to keep up with the beans. A regular who goes by the name of “Vegan Star” has been buying over $100 of our blueberries weekly, because, he tells me, our fruit is “high vibration.” I’m not sure exactly what this means, but I think he might be right.

Go west, young woman. After ten years in Brooklyn, Saskia Cornes went west to apprentice at an organic farm overlooking the Pacific.

Photo credit:Saskia Cornes and Carole Topalian.

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Vienna’s Brooklyn

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Crossing the Danube Canal from Vienna’s glittering historic center to the city’s less glamorous Second District, I knew I was entering our borough’s “sister city”—my Brooklyn bones could feel the average monthly rent on a two-bedroom apartment drop by about 35 percent.

Leopoldstadt, as the district is known, was officially linked to Brooklyn in 2007, when Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and Vienna’s Deputy Mayor Renate Brauer signed a joint proclamation announcing a “district partnership” intended to strengthen relations between the communities. Beyond the multiethnic and historically Jewish heritage that inspired the part- nership, there are other similarities, if you look. Take the Prater, Vienna’s sprawling amusement park (and home to that giant Ferris wheel featured in The Third Man)—it could be an immaculately groomed version of Coney Island, with the long, skinny debreziners at the wurst stands doing an awfully good impression of Nathan’s dogs.

But many modern Brooklynites will feel more at home at the lively Karmelitermarkt, a farmers market at the center of life in Leopoldstadt, on a public square called Karmeliterplatz. Ever since Austrian thinker Rudolf Steiner provided the philosophical underpinnings for what would become the organic farming movement in the early 20th century, the country has become one of the world’s leaders in the field; it was one of the first countries to set official organic guidelines, and its government continues to subsidize ecological farming practices. as a result, close to 20 percent of its farms are organic, more than in any other European country (except tiny Liechtenstein).

If you want to see this policy in action, Karmeliterplatz is the best farmers market in the city, a place where you can get a good head of organic spitzkohl, a kind of pointy cabbage, grown and sold by a farmer who can tell you what to do with it. There’s always fresh produce for sale at makeshift farm stands on the plaza, but on Saturday, the market fills out with artisan producers selling wood- oven bread, raw-milk cheeses and speck made from heritage-breed pigs that look like woolly sheep.

Indeed the entire country—which has a population about the size of New York City’s—is something of a real-food wonderland, complete with civic composting programs (jealous much?), perfect pastries in every corner café (they make Sachertorte look easy), and fine locavore vino (Vienna is the only capital in the world with significant wine production within city limits) made by rock-star vintners wearing plastic glasses as big as any you’ll see on the L train. Don’t cross the canal before hitting the cutting-edge restaurants—friendly, chic little spots that reinterpret classic Viennese dishes with a light, contemporary touch—like Shopik and Lohr, whose stately wainscoting is offset by the outsize scribblings of artist Otto Zitko all over its ceiling; or the all-organic Schöne Perle, a neo-beisl (or new-style neighborhood joint) that kept the name (“Beautiful Pearl”) of the Chinese restaurant that used to occupy the space. Just remember to bring your euros—Schöne Perle is cash-only. This is Brooklyn’s sister, after all.

Photo credit:  Rainer Fehringer.

 

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Boswyck Farms Is All Wet

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Everything is illuminated. To inspire other year-round farmers, hydroponic master Lee Mandell uses the majority of his Bushwick apartment as a massive grow room.

Everything is illuminated. To inspire other year-round farmers, hydroponic master Lee Mandell uses the majority of his Bushwick apartment as a massive grow room.

Apartment 1D at 1609 Dekalb Avenue stands at the intersection of science fiction and locavore utopia. It might be 20 degrees outside, but here in Lee Mandell’s 1,000-square-foot Bushwick loft hang row after row of tender lettuce, cucumbers, bok choy and basil, all rooted not in soil but in plastic trays hooked up to pumps of dissolved nutrients like some leafy sequel to The Matrix. True, it’s nowhere as lovely as a row of tomatoes reaching toward the summer’s rays, but urbanites have to eat, even in February—and thanks to hydroponic farmers like Lee, they can.

Mandell calls his business—and his home—Boswyck Farms, and it’s actually his second career in tech. The 49-year-old with a curly mop of hair and slightly hippie sensibility was a computer programmer until just three years ago. That’s when an urban farm project at Columbia University got him pumped about hydroponic projects feeding neighborhoods in need. He left the keyboard for kohlrabi.

“Cities grow up,” says Mandell, “and so should our gardens.”

He and his staff of four now help fund, build and maintain hydroponic farms for organizations like the Child Development Support Corporation in Clinton Hill. That project—three double-stacked six-foot wooden shelves in the back of the nonprofit’s office—was funded in part with a U.N. seed grant and now supplies fresh vegetables to their weekly food pantry, even when local markets are a rainbow of roots. And at a nearby Bushwick public high school called the Academy of Urban Planning, Mandell has helped install a modern garden of Babylon: vertical planters that climb 16 feet tall. It’s part of an urban farmette and after-school project for 10th graders managed with help from a local nonprofit called EcoStation.

Most of the year you can also see Mandell’s techniques on the roof of 207 Starr Street, the super-artsy performance space called Bushwick Starr—where a demo project welcomes avant-garde theater patrons with sorrel when they go out for smoke breaks.

Better still is one of the two-hour workshops Mandell runs out of his apartment, which feels like the inside of an aquarium, thanks to the fluorescent grow lights and burbling water pumps. You’ll learn how to make your own kit with a small bucket, clay pellets and plastic tubing—no summer sun required.

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A Man, a Plan, Manure

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Peter Osofsky had been delivering Ronnybrook milk to my restaurant, Egg, every Saturday morning for almost four years before I managed to arrange a trip to visit the farm. What drew me there at last wasn’t milk but manure: We’d just begun farming our own land up in Greene County at the base of the Catskills, and we needed manure to build up our soil.

I’d mentioned it several times to Peter, and he’d always encouraged me to come and take as much as I wanted. But I had trouble accepting this offer. I knew how precious good compost and manure were. I couldn’t believe that Peter’s offer was quite genuine. “We have tons of it. Literally,” he’d tell me, as I made out the check for the week’s milk, butter and cream. “Just call me and come get it. Anytime.” “That’d be great,” I’d say, “maybe I will”—and I’d head back to the kitchen, nursing a fantasy of creating a loop: their manure fertilizing our vegetables, which we’d later cook in their butter.

It was the middle of our second summer on the farm when I finally decided I’d take Peter up on his offer. He gave me his dad’s phone number, and after some nervous pacing, I called. Rick Osofsky is the younger son of the dairy’s founders, brother to the eponymous Ronny, and I’d been assured he’d be happy to hear from me. But I called with the trepidation of someone approaching a celebrity, afraid to impose, anxious to make a good impression. When he answered, he was quick and terse, a man with a lot to do. Yes, I could come get manure, and, yes, today would be a fine day. But he warned me his time was tight, so I’d need to be prompt. He had a dinner to get to, and he’d need time to dress. I assured him I’d be quick, threw a shovel in the back of my truck and headed out, leaving the ragtag foothills of the Catskills behind as I crossed the Hudson at the Rip Van Winkle and wound down toward Ancramdale.

I had a lot of ideas about what the farm would look like. I’d driven through the hills of southern Columbia County before, in the neighborhood of Ronnybrook: This was the land of the gentleman farmer, the Manhattan refugee who’d cashed in his young fortune for an Eyebrow Colonial and 200 acres to raise a dozen heritage-breed sheep. It’s breathtaking country, full of beautiful houses, foggy valleys, thoroughbreds grazing on rolling pasture. It’s just the sort of arcadian place you’d expect to find milk in thick glass quart bottles, where you get the impression not quite that time stood still, but that the antiques market is strong.

I pictured Rick Osofsky as a kind of Hudson Valley Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, outfitted by Orvis and presiding over a farm that looked like a spread from the French Laundry cookbook. I imagined he’d greet me on his bluestone terrace, tie half-knotted, and wave me in the direction of his pile of shit. I’d head off and shovel while he showered and called for his Land Rover. Rationally, I knew better than to trust my fantasy. But those glass bottles had stoked it pretty vigorously since I’d first seen them, almost 10 years earlier, on the counter of the Doughnut Plant on the Lower East Side. I went in to look at doughnuts, but it was the milk that caught my eye. That bottle sitting there, a drip of cream clinging to the glass, inspired what felt like a fever, and though I normally drank my coffee black, in this case I poured milk in generously and watched, thrilled, as threads of unhomogenized cream floated to the top of my cup. I’d had milk like that only once before, at my uncle’s small farm outside Wilmington, North Carolina. He loved to hold up the bottle from the morning’s milking to show off the thick layer of cream that was clotting the neck. Then he’d stick his finger into it and eat a teaspoon of cream and shake his head with delight.

Growing up, most of the milk I’d drunk had come in waxy cartons and smelled of the school cafeteria. Judging from the number of people who’ve run up to us at Egg to show us that the milk in their coffee was bad—“Look! It’s curdled!”—it’s a rare New Yorker who grew up with unhomogenized milk. So if the bottles evoke nostalgia, it’s for a past few of us have ever actually experienced. The nostalgia, in any case, is only window dressing; the milk needs no help making its case once it’s passed your lips.

We get the milk at the restaurant in huge plastic bags, the sort that live inside giant metal dispensers next to silos of frosted flakes at a college dining hall. There’s nothing charming about them, especially when you’re wrangling one in the middle of a brunch rush, trying to direct a stream of milk from its bag in a crate on the shelf into a pitcher in your hand. The bag flops around dangerously; the nozzle clogs with cream and tempts you to give the bag an angry squeeze, which inevitably results in milk spraying everywhere like a wild hose. But there isn’t a person at Egg who would trade it out for something easier. Like most adults, our cooks come in jaded about milk: It’s for kids, coffee and bachelor party cocktails. But drinking Ronnybrook’s milk—taking the last swig out of the pitcher before it goes into the dish pit—changes everyone. It’s like everything else that we’ve gotten used to eating in an industrially processed form: You try it fresh, less fussed with, and you realize how much you’ve been missing. It’s sweet and rich and clean. You can taste pasture. It changes as the seasons change. It makes you start to care again about something you hadn’t realized you’d written off.

The Osofskys started doing their own bottling at a time when milk—and New York’s dairy industry—was getting written off by everyone, including dairy farmers themselves. At the beginning of the 1980s, there were 30 dairy farms within 15 miles of Ronnybrook. But milk prices dropped so low that the government started paying farmers to euthanize their cows. One after another of the Osofskys’ neighbors shut up shop, killing their cows and selling their land, following what looked like the only sane route available. Rick and Ronny wouldn’t do it. They loved their cows and they believed in their milk, and they were determined to find a way to save them. Building their own bottling plant was an unlikely gamble against doom. It meant new equipment and additional labor, and it meant giving up the stability of selling to a cooperative, where their milk would get mixed with milk from dozens of other farms, then homogenized and pasteurized. It would be many days before the milk reached a customer’s cup. But by bottling their own, they’d gain some control over what happened to it. They pasteurized their milk more gently, which meant it tasted fresher and sweeter than commodity milk. It also meant that they could get their milk to customers as quickly as 24 hours after milking.

They began in 1986 and, encouraged by the reception, soon expanded to Greenmarkets in the city. There they caught the attention of the New York Times’s Florence Fabricant, whose praise solidified their standing among city food lovers. Dairy is still a volatile and beleaguered business in New York: Fewer and fewer farmers are making a living milking cows. Of the 30 dairies that Ronnybrook counted as neighbors in 1980, not one is left.

Ancramdale itself was the first surprise on my trip to Ronnybrook. I think I half-expected a milk-themed village, a Main Street lined with ice cream shops and cow sculptures. I certainly expected a sign pointing the way to what I thought of as the town’s claim to fame. I hadn’t paid much attention to Rick’s directions because I assumed once I got to Ancramdale it would be so obvious, but now that I was here, I realized I was lost: I saw a small café, closed for the afternoon; a sign offering rabbits for sale; a post office, also closed. No indication anywhere that this town was home to the region’s best milk. Nor could I find a cell signal to call for help, and though I’d left myself time to allow for getting lost, I was cutting it close. As I made one blind turn after another I began to imagine a baronial Osofsky checking his watch and making up his mind to dismiss me on sight.

I finally found a road whose name rang a bell and drove what seemed like miles uphill before I saw some barns, some calves’ hutches and a Ronnybrook delivery truck parked by the side of the road. I parked in a hurry under a large tree just downhill from an array of solar panels. To one side was a small ranch-style house that might have been staff housing. On the other side stood an assemblage of large blue sheds. A sign over one door indicated the farm store. I tried to look composed and efficient as I headed through it. Someone there could surely point me in Rick’s direction. I stepped into a workroom, and as my eyes were adjusting I heard someone say “You must be George.” I turned, and there he was: a man, dressed as if for milking, a baseball cap pulled low over his brow, whose every movement gave him away as Peter’s father. I shook his hand and unreeled a deferential greeting. “You can just point me in the direction of the manure and leave me to it,” I said. “I know you’ve got places to go.” “Well,” he nodded. “Why don’t I show you the dairy first?”

Suddenly it felt like it would be ruder to rush than to dally. He took me through the bottling plant, which had grown from a 10- by 10-foot room in the ’80s to a full-fledged operation. I saw where the bottles came in to be washed, the machines that filled and capped them. He walked me into a freezer filled with ice cream, and showed me pallets of yogurt. We stood on the loading dock where our orders were stacked onto the truck every Friday night. We were taking our time, ambling from one room to the next, stopping to speak to employees, pausing to admire machinery that had served them for decades. And when we were done with the dairy, we walked over to the milking barn. I never even saw him glance at his watch. I’d seen milking operations before—a friend worked at the University of Georgia’s dairy, where the machinery seemed to be the main event and cows an afterthought. There it was all gleaming stainless cylinders and rubber tubing; vats of sanitizing chemicals and thick hoses; stanchions to hold cows in place as they were hooked up like heart-attack victims on a defibrillator assembly line. This barn looked like an animal sanctuary by comparison. It was clean and tidy, to be sure, but dominated by wood and straw rather than rubber and metal. The stalls were the size of a Manhattan bedroom, thickly layered with dry straw. Over each of the 100 stalls was a cow’s name and the menu for her day’s meal—the mix of supplemental grain and grass she wanted to stay healthy. The cows’ entrance, at the far end of the barn, opened to where pasture rolled out as far as the eye could see: The farm’s 750 acres span two counties and two townships. The milking cows wander in from those pastures twice a day, coming when called, and each cow heads to her stall and waits to be milked. Afterward, they head back out when the weather’s good and spend the day grazing their way through 250 acres of pasture as long as the grass keeps growing. The dry cows and calves are free to roam as they like, going into their own barn when they want shelter and roaming the pasture when they don’t.

In the city, out of context, Ronnybrook can feel like the juggernaut of the artisanal milk business, an almost ubiquitous presence in better food markets and restaurants. They’re in a dozen Greenmarkets, they have a retail store in Chelsea Market, you can even order their stuff through FreshDirect. They make everything from heavy cream to drinkable yogurt to crème fraîche. But all that food begins here, humbly. Most of it comes from 100 cows they know by name, and who are the offspring of generation after generation of cows who’ve lived there. Three generations of Osofskys romp around the farm now, too. Brothers Rick and Ronny still run things. Their kids—Pete, Kate and Daniel—tend the cows, oversee markets and deliveries and manage the office. Rick’s 11-year-old granddaughter has cows of her own, which she shows at the county fair. Pete’s daughter, Maya, tumbles around the farm, too, all of two years old.

It’d been more than an hour since I’d first arrived, and Rick hadn’t once mentioned his dinner date. I was trying to play it cool, but I was getting more and more anxious about making him late. My anxiety was at a peak when he finally brought up the manure. “Let me show you what we’ve got—I’ll just go get the tractor and meet you up there.” He pointed to a barn up the hill from where I’d parked. I drove up and waited for him to come up with his frontend loader. Watching it bounce along the ruts of the drive, I began to suspect that he wasn’t especially eager to get to this dinner—that he might be just as happy to spend the evening here with his cows.

If you haven’t learned to love at least the idea of manure, you haven’t really embraced the food revolution. Manure is where the rubber hits the road, where all of the things we extract from the dirt to feed ourselves begin to get put back in, a reinvestment in our ability to continue eating well—or at all. Rick showed me manure at three or four stages of “cooking,” from fresh stuff (slick and odiferous) to well-composted piles of it that were sweet-smelling and full of earthworms. I opted for a mix, as though I were at a salad bar, and Rick dug in with his tractor. He dumped a load of each into the bed of my truck, which bounced and sagged under the weight. I thought he looked at me a little pityingly then, when he realized my tiny Nissan wasn’t going to hold any more. “I guess we’d better leave it at that,” he said. I thanked him for the tour and for the manure. I wanted to thank him for the milk, the yogurt, the butter that we eat by the spoonful, spread cold against a slice of country ham. But my effusiveness would have been out of place. He deserved my adulation, but he didn’t want or need it. So I kept it short. He shook my hand from his tractor seat and finally—more to my relief than his, it seemed— headed off to put up his tractor and get ready for the evening.

I drove back across the river toward our tiny farm, one nervous eye on my payload. That manure, from cows with names like Amelia and Cassie who were cared for like pets, would help to turn our sparse and rocky topsoil into something that could produce abundant vegetables for years. The carrots and purple beans and kale, which we’d take later that summer to the restaurant and glaze in butter from those same cows, or gratinée with their milk and cream, would complete a nutritional cycle that touched down in three counties: Columbia, Greene and Kings. And at every point in that cycle, someone or something was eating as well as she or it could dream: The cows feasted on clover; the carrots on composted manure; and we on those carrots, sautéed in butter as sweet as summer.

Ronnybrook rhapsody. Rick Osofsky, right, runs the farm with his bearded brother Ronny and son Peter. “I’d seen milking operations before,” writes Weld, “where the machinery seemed to be the main event and the cows an afterthought. Ronnybrook’s barn looked like an animal sanctuary by comparison, dominated by wood and straw rather than rubber and metal.”

Think outside the jug. Like most adults, Egg’s cooks come in jaded about milk: it’s for kids, coffee and bachelor party cocktails. But drinking Ronnybrook’s milk—taking the last swig out of the pitcher before it goes into the dish pit—changes everyone.

Photo credits:  Moya McAllister and June Russell.

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A Wealth of Produce in 66 Square Feet

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Four years into the new century I paid rent to a family of dramatic landlords on Flatbush Avenue, on the ratty edge of Park Slope. Their oversize teenage children, pale and hulking, would show up at the door and make perplexing demands. Such as, “Stop throwing eggs at our terrace.” Their terrace next door was covered in Astroturf—a good target for eggs, but not mine.The parents’ marital strife tore daily through our shared brick walls. The teenagers stole my boots. They scared my cat. To clear a blocked drain they poured gallons of drain cleaner into the bath till the fumes turned my forest of basil in the sunny bathroom into Agent Orangeland. And then my boyfriend-who-never-stopped-smiling dumped me.It was time to move.

My former downstairs neighbors, Constanza and Blake, had already fled the Troglodytes, as we called them. They told me that a tiny, top-floor apartment was available in their building in Cobble Hill. It had been empty for ages, uninhabitably small. I looked at it: 400 square feet, but with an east-facing terrace open to the sky. I could sit outside, I could grill, I could grow a garden. The landlord lived off-site. I moved in.

In my apartment life, I had rarely been without homegrown herbs. They’d reached from narrow windowsills, spilled from hanging baskets, floors high. After such horticultural privations, this terrace, measuring just over 12 by 5 feet, seemed colossal. Sure, it was smaller than the penthouse roof gardens I designed for a living, but I knew how to pack the pots in. I started hauling terra cotta, bags of soil and plants up four flights of stairs.

Each summer the terrace is an edible jungle. I strip dark blueberries from their branches and collect Thai basil from plants three feet tall. The purple basil is vibrating with bees. Chives are doubled over under their own weight and ever-bearing strawberries in six-inch pots produce succulent fruit every three weeks. I chop self-seeding summer savory by the handful into a green rub for pork ribs and grill them over hardwood charcoal in the barbecue (a braai in my native Afrikaans). Smoke rises through the branches of the little fig tree which, some years, produces over 100 brown-skinned fruits, white inside, tasting like honey. In the balmy dark, tall lilies perfume the surrounding rooftops and drip nectar to attract night pollinators.

Up on my own silvertop roof, I started a farm, housed in light plastic. It began as a piece of ironic installation humor: You are not allowed to live in Brooklyn if you don’t have a farm, spin your own yarn, keep your own chickens or raise a hog. (You haven’t read it? It’s a clause at the bottom of the contract.) Well, I don’t knit, pigs’ hooves would puncture the roof membrane and the cat would chase the chickens.

So my upstairs glut of compact cucumbers becomes soup, salad and a fridgeful of pickles. Potatoes are picked, garlic pulled. There are black raspberries and white currants. By late July and August the roof farm has reached its zenith in production—delivering a clutch of Sugar Baby watermelons, daily handfuls of heirloom cherry tomatoes, Red Zebras, Brandywines. I battle an Armageddon of tobacco hornworms on their leaves. Zucchini form delicately beneath fresh yellow blossoms; eggplants hang heavily beneath improbably tropical leaves. Later, peppers turn red and purple. I make ratatouille, tomato consommé, bruschetta. We eat buffalo mozzarella with skinned tomatoes, naked and slippery, strewn with bruised basil.

I bought my first digital camera to record the fog on a blueberry’s ripe skin; the figs becoming round and brown; an herbed Porterhouse on the braai. Soon I started a blog, called 66 Square Feet. Searching for photography advice, I found a tutorial on a Web site—Coriolistic Anachronisms—based in Vancouver. Six months later I married Vincent Mounier, the blogger whose description of photographing a saucisson backlit against a field of lavender had been catnip to me. He left his wide-open woods and mountains and squeezed into the tiny apartment with me.

In the long summer twilights we sit on the silvertop between satellite dishes and tomato teepees, holding cold mojitos where crushed terrace mint floats beneath the ice. Later, on the terrace, we eat dinner and look up at a Brooklyn sky whose uninterrupted, star-pricked arc feels like genuine luxury. The food on our plates grew within arm’s reach.

I spare a thought for the Troglodytes, and exchange a wink with the cat, waiting at our feet for tidbits. We have swapped their tyranny for a garden—and three square feet of kitchen counter space, the yin to the terrace’s yang. But that is another story.

Want to read more of Viljoen’s eloquent essays on Brooklyn-grown food? Go to ediblebrooklyn.com.

Photo credit: Marie Viljoen

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A Two-Acre Farm Will Help Brooklynites Get Hyperlocal Veggies

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You think Brooklyn wants more fresh local produce? What about another million pounds a year?

That’s what an outfit called BrightFarms is planning to grow in a state-of-the-art hydroponic greenhouse slated for a warehouse rooftop in Sunset Park.

The two-acre farm won’t exactly restore Brooklyn to the status it enjoyed in the 1880s, when it was the second-most-productive agricultural county in all of the United States (top honors went to Queens). But it will make it easier for Brooklynites to get hyperlocal veggies, within hours of harvest.

Why a greenhouse? Because eaters expect summer veggies year-round, says Paul Lightfoot, the company’s CEO. “In a perfect world,” he concedes, “people might eat beets and carrots all winter. But that’s not the world I live in.”

But even with season extension, the system will be greener than those on distant industrial farms whose crops are trucked into Brooklyn daily. While commercial operations in the arid Southwest irrigate with scarce Colorado River water, this company’s greenhouses collect rain and recirculate it, using city water only as a supplemental supply.

Still, there are some significant uncertainties. While BrightFarms generally finances its projects via a contract with a single seller, it does not yet have a deal in hand—though Lightfoot says the company is talking to several supermarkets. Then there’s the matter of size: To date BrightFarms has set up only a handful of much smaller greenhouses. Partly to address that concern, the company just hired, as its VP of agriculture, a Dutchman whose last job was running a California greenhouse more than 50 times the size of the one BrightFarms is planning here.

Salmar Properties, which owns the former Navy warehouse, was introduced to BrightFarms by the office of the Borough President as part of a campaign to increase food production in Brooklyn. Project manager Ian Siegel says the 1918 building is perfect for light industry, with a huge parking lot, loading bays and 23 elevators—including one that will hold 8,000 pounds, the better to get all that produce down to street level.

Also coming in handy, especially for Brooklyn’s growing army of infrastructure-hungry artisan entrepreneurs, (see related story) is the seventh floor, most recently occupied by the Food and Drug Administration, and outfitted with three elegant tiled refrigerators, each bigger than the average New York apartment. The plan is to turn the whole floor, giant fridges and all, into a massive food-processing space.

“Think about it,” Siegel muses, “we could grow hot peppers on the roof and a company below could be making Brooklyn Hot Sauce.”

Raising (food on) the roof. Paul Lightfood, CEO of a company called Bright Farms, is building a state-of-the-art hydroponic greenouse atop a Sunset Park warehouse. The Markowitz-brokered business is slated to yield a million pounds of produce per year. 

 

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Going in for the Kill

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The problem is that I really smell like human.

So says Peter Zander, the Upper East Side expat and professional photographer who decamped to the Hudson Valley, via Paris, two decades ago and last year began hosting deer-hunting workshop weekends on his 40 acres of woodlands up in Columbia County. Like me, most of his clients have never hunted. Their familiarity with free-range meats stems more from Whole Foods freezers than hours logged in a wobbly tree stand at dawn.

Zander, 56, didn’t grow up hunting, although his father probably taught you a thing or two about the topic. (Jack Zander was the first animator to work on Jerry, as in Tom and.) But Peter and his wife have spent much of their adult lives getting close to their food supply, raising rare breeds of poultry with their daughters and designing and selling solar-powered mobile chicken coops. Their red meat of choice is venison.

He explains that deer can smell people from a long way off, and suggests I pile on as many layers of his frumpy, aired-out sweaters as I can while still preserving vague arm mobility—at least enough to pull a trigger.

Once I’m swaddled in six hand-me-downs, Zander completes my chubby-kid-in-winter look with an old leather jacket and a bright-orange hunting vest before spritzing me with scent-masking spray for good measure. I scale the tree that hosts my stand, grip the hand-warmers tucked in every pocket, and face the wind, scanning the forest for movement, ready to fell a winter’s worth of dinner.

Stereotypes of hunting culture hew toward images of red-state burly men who prefer the NRA to the EPA. And while many hunters fit the type, Zander doesn’t. He’s not out for a trophy rack to hang above the fireplace, but for food to cook in it. Like the people who sign up for his weekend workshops—which take you from “Intro to Hunting” to “Venison Butchering” and cost from $250 to $950 per person—he hungers for the connective experience to the natural world that cannot be found in even the tenderest cut of grassfed beef. He says finding, killing and butchering the animal you’re going to eat is about as visceral an understanding as you can ask for.

Zander and his wife, Nancy, who serves participants the rustic, family-style locavore dinners you’d expect while tracking game with Martha Stewart, know that large swaths of the country, particularly suburban and exurban regions, are overrun with deer. The fragmented woodlands of low-density development (which deer actually prefer), a lack of predators and the abundant offerings of ornamental and vegetable gardens have brought about an explosion in deer numbers. Biologists cite the unchecked population as responsible for the spike in Lyme disease, predominantly spread by deer ticks.

Moreover, the calories in wild venison have a carbon footprint lower than even the best farmed meat—even pastured pork and poultry eat some grain (which requires tractors and trucks), are often kept safe from coyotes via electric fencing and otherwise tap the grid. Wild deer meat’s environmental impact may be lower than that of commercial vegetables.

“Everything we’ve been working toward is about connecting people to the environment and sustainable living,” Zander says. “Hunting gives you a better appreciation of your impact both as a consumer and as a participant in the world.”

In many ways, the Zander experience is the antithesis of bustling up to the butcher case to grab a shrink-wrapped sirloin. Don’t be fooled by notions of speeding bullets—this is about as slow as food gets. It takes time and a superlative level of stillness to even see a deer in the woods.

“When you get to the point of being in that really quiet place, that’s when you take your deer,” Zander says. “It’s kind of shocking when that gun goes off and that animal falls. If you haven’t reached that quiet place, you won’t see anything.”

“A lot of people think it’s just ‘Give me a gun and I’ll go shoot something,’” says Jon Veleas, a fellow photographer and longtime hunter who serves as a guide on Zander’s hunting trips. “That’s not the case at all.”

These gatherings aren’t testosterone-fueled affairs, explains the lanky, mild-mannered Zander, who shot his first deer decades ago. Instead, he sees the weekends as opportunities for people to participate in the intimate, hands-on experience of harvesting their own meat from the wild. Participants prepare a tree stand, spend time on target practice with their own gun and otherwise prepare for November 17, when deer season begins with the sunrise.

Zander and Veleas field-dress and butcher their deer, making a point of using every part of the animal. They’ve even been known to salvage meat from fresh roadkill. Zander’s Lab almost exclusively eats raw venison.

Zander’s favorite tree stand, 25 feet up in the air, boasts a nylon safety strap, one ledge for feet, a tinier ledge for a hunter’s butt and a sweeping view of a floodplain, bisected by a brook.

Shivering with the force of a pneumatic paint shaker, looking forward to hours more in a vertigo-inducing stand, I realize that hunting takes as much fortitude as force. Like many urbanites, I’ve often assumed modern hunters, with their sharpshooter equipment and paraphernalia, violate fair play with the ease of the kill. But any deer these hunters take are hard won.

“It’s the biggest and hardest chess game,” says Veleas, who, as an eight-year-old, saw his mother burst into tears after shooting her first deer.

For newcomers, the process will require dedication. Participants learn about the animal and its environment, and are guided through getting gun certification and a hunting license. Veleas, who grew up hunting in Connecticut and Vermont, spends a day teaching participants to recognize scrapes (places where bucks break or twist low branches, then paw the earth below and urinate to draw does) and rubs (marks on the trees from bucks rubbing the velvet off of their antlers, tagging the tree with their glandular scent and strengthening their neck muscles to fight for females). He also helps familiarize people with their tree stands and scent control.

Finally, new hunters will find themselves up a tree, gun in hand, scanning the woods for movement. Should they kill a deer, there will be the tasks of gutting, cleaning and curing, and then a final weekend spent skinning and butchering.

It’s a lot of effort, but it can result in months of meat. Venison is leaner than beef or pork and, if dressed and butchered right, it’s silky with only the slightest hint of gaminess.

This fall, Karl Kuhnen, an ironworker and former butcher who grew up on a farm, will teach Zander’s hunters how to properly butcher a deer. Knife skills are particularly important with venison: It’s the fat that can give venison an undesirable gaminess, and leaving the fat on can contaminate the entire carcass.

Still, Kuhnen wants his charges to not get preoccupied with the perfect cut. “Don’t be afraid,” he says, pointing out that hunters’ cuts aren’t destined for the butcher case. “You just have to get in there and do it!”

That said, he does offer a few words of caution, delivered with characteristic frankness: “Don’t puncture stuff that shouldn’t be punctured.”

Kuhnen says the backstrap, or tenderloin, is most people’s favorite cut. “Honestly, I like when my wife stews a part like the neck,” Kuhnen says. “She just throws it in the Crock-Pot for a day and a half.”

Nancy’s bacon and cheddar scone was a highlight of the morning I spent in my tree stand, where I was certain the chattering of my teeth was scaring away all nearby life forms. I saw no deer that morning, nor when I went out again at dusk, but despite that fact—or rather, because of it—I gained a deeper respect for hunting and the particular blend of skill and sheer luck it requires.

“A big part of hunting is about becoming so silent in the woods that you really for the first time see the life in the forest and the fields,” says Zander. “It’s the whole process and experiencing a day of real quiet. It’s so incredibly meditative.”

Photo credit: Peter Zander

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The Empire State Strikes Back

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Gillibrand_beautiful-buffet

In August, when New York’s U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand visited Quail Hill Farm on Long Island for a meet-and-greet over peach cobbler, farmer Scott Chaskey told the 100 or so assembled chefs, growers and other vote-with-your-fork types that when the farm’s community-supported agriculture program began more than two decades ago, so-called CSAs were a new concept in the United States. Despite exponential growth—today there are about 400 CSAs in New York State alone, and about 6,500 nationwide—“never would we have guessed,” said Chaskey “that a senator would be interested in CSAs.”

The senators that New York sends to Washington have long shaped the national agenda—think of Robert F. Wagner (alongside fellow New Yorker President Franklin D. Roosevelt) orchestrating the New Deal, Robert F. Kennedy’s focus on civil rights or Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s interventions on urban renewal and foreign policy. Yet the phrases “the senator from New York” and “national agriculture policy” have seldom appeared in the same sentence. Kirsten Gillibrand is hoping to change that.

When first elected to Congress in 2007 to represent New York’s 20th District, Gillibrand served on the House Committee on Agriculture, and when she was appointed to the Senate in 2009—to fill the seat vacated when Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State—she became the first New York senator in 41 years to join the Senate’s powerful Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee. A 21-member body traditionally dominated by senators from the Midwest and South, the Agriculture Committee oversees the farm bill: the omnibus legislative package, rewritten every five years, that’s expected to outlay a trillion dollars over the next decade, overseeing everything from crop subsidies and slaughterhouse regulations to food stamps, land conservation and organic standards—effectively molding our nation’s food system.

Gillibrand represents tractor types, yes, but also urbanites. She understands that while there are only 36,000 farms left in the state—down from almost 150,000 at the end of World War II—agricultural policy impacts everyone who eats. Yet legislators from rural, heartland states see the farm bill as their domain. The junior senator from New York has her work cut out for her.

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New York’s upstate economy of farms, government and industry is a familiar one for Gillibrand. Her formative years were spent in the Capital Region, where she received a unique political education from her maternal grandmother, Polly Noonan. In 1937 Noonan, while working as a secretary at the Scenic Hudson Commission, met then-State Senator Erastus Corning 2nd, who headed the commission and was being groomed by the state Democratic machine to become Albany’s mayor. He soon did ascend to the mayor’s office and served from 1941 to his death in 1983.

Polly Noonan was married, but she remained Mayor Corning’s closest political confidant for four decades. He was estranged from his children and spent little time with his wife, instead having his own recliner in the Noonan living room. There’s no conclusive evidence of a romantic liaison between Corning and Gillibrand’s grandmother, though rumors titillated Albany for decades. Governor Mario Cuomo, who clerked in Albany’s court of appeals in the 1950s, described the capital’s hierarchy to the New York Times thusly: “Corning was the de facto leader. Polly was the leader.” A half dozen members of the Noonan family ended up on the Albany city or county payroll. In an interview with New York magazine, Gillibrand spoke of helping her grandmother in political work with an occasional prankish twist: “We’d do typical stuff like putting bumper stickers on cars,” she said. “Sometimes, you are putting your own candidate’s bumper sticker over somebody else’s candidate’s bumper sticker.” She has described her mother, Penny, as similarly dogged, whether in politics, law, pie-making or raising Gillibrand and her two siblings. An avid hunter, Penny would head to the woods each November to shoot the family’s Thanksgiving turkey.

Gillibrand attended Dartmouth and interned at the office of then-Senator Alfonse D’Amato. After law school at UCLA, she made her first successful career as a Manhattan corporate defense lawyer at the white-shoe firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell. In 2000, Gillibrand took a position in Washington at the Department of Housing and Urban Development under then-Secretary Andrew Cuomo. When George W. Bush defeated Al Gore that fall, she returned to corporate law, but convinced the partners at Boies, Schiller & Flexner to allow her to work in the Albany office and prepare for a potential electoral run. She took up residence in the town of Hudson, and in 2006 defeated Republican incumbent John Sweeney for the congressional seat in New York’s Republican-leaning 20th District, extending from the upper Hudson Valley to the North Country.

In the House, Gillibrand laid down the foundations for both her focus on farming and upstate political success: she gained a coveted seat on the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee. And on the afternoon in January 2009 that she was appointed to the Senate, she made clear her intention: to secure a seat on the Agriculture Committee for the Senate.

Americans might wonder why Gillibrand should focus on agriculture, when none of the nation’s “Big Five” commodity crops (corn, soy, wheat, rice and cotton) plays a serious role in the Empire State economy.

But while New York isn’t a hub for mega-farms growing endless acres of soybeans or wheat, our state is among the nation’s top five producers of such mainstays as milk, apples, grapes, pears, cabbage, squash, pumpkins and maple syrup. (“The average New Yorker may not know that,” Gillibrand noted.)

Moreover, our metropolis has enormous agricultural importance, as the urban appetite for locally grown, sustainably raised ingredients has brought about one of the most vibrant local food infrastructures in the country. New York State is now home to 827 organic farms—the fourth highest in the nation—and 647 farmers markets, second only to California.

Many small, diverse New York farms are flourishing in spite of decades of federal legislation that has favored industrial agribusiness. New York receives just $15 per person of federal funding for agriculture, while Iowa (home to only twice as many farms) receives 34 times that amount: $510 per person.

“A lot of ag policy isn’t written for New York ag,” said Gillibrand. “It’s not for small farmers, not for organic farmers, not for beekeepers. As a consequence, our national ag policy doesn’t reflect common sense.”

Senator Gillibrand can speak the language of the Slow Food movement, championing a system in which small, sustainable farms sell their crops to local residents, restaurants and relief organizations to create a value-added multiplier effect that ripples throughout the economy. But she also cleverly incorporates a national security idiom more familiar in the halls of Congress. “I don’t ever want to get my food from as far away as China,” Gillibrand said in the summer of 2011, as food-tainting scandals made headlines. “We have a wholesome food economy in New York and we want to support and enhance that. And in a world where…terrorism threatens our food supply, preserving regional production is actually a national security issue.”

Since the 1970s, Washington’s message to American farmers has been exactly the opposite: “Get big or get out.” USDA subsidies have vastly expanded production of commodity crops, which, in turn, become cheap animal feed and processed foods. The policies continue today: From 1995 to 2010, the largest 10 percent of farms in the country received 76 percent of government crop subsidies. Sixty-two percent of farms received nothing. In 2010, subsidies for corn, wheat and soybeans alone accounted for 75 percent of all agricultural subsidies.

Gillibrand, the newest member of the Senate Ag Committee, is rooting for a very different group of food producers: upstate yogurt makers, small-batch picklers, vintners and distillers. And, of course, growers of so-called specialty crops—like broccoli and carrots.

“I meet with as many farmers as can meet with me. Not only are they the salt of the earth, but they are also some of the smartest businessmen and businesswomen I’ve ever met.”

According to David Haight, New York State Director of the American Farmland Trust, part of what has made Gillibrand effective is her ability to see the big picture—for both the state and the country. “As a Democratic woman legislator, she has proven able to win over conservative Republican farmers by working aggressively on issues such as milk pricing and immigration reform [for farmworkers]. This is no small task. But, she has also proven adept at leading on nutrition issues that appeal to urban communities, such as school food.”

“Kirsten is always interested in discussing new concepts to further agricultural interests,” said Joe Gergela, head of the Long Island Farm Bureau. These include a number of programs off the farm, such as Gergela’s work with the senator to get teens working at farmers markets and to assist Long Island food banks.

Last year, Gillibrand called on the FDA to implement a standard identity for honey to protect domestic producers from deceptive practices by foreign companies.

Craft distiller Ralph Erenzo of the Hudson Valley–based Tuthilltown Spirits has even bent the senator’s ear about a European Union law that only allows spirits to be called whiskey if they’ve aged for more than three years. Gillibrand is taking up the issue with American trade officials and hopes to again make American spirits available to European barkeeps.

And many of her initiatives have benefited urban eaters here in Brooklyn. Gillibrand introduced legislation to provide wireless devices that process Food Stamps (SNAP) to farmers markets, including the Fort Greene and Grand Army Plaza Greenmarkets. She put her muscle behind the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, which would help combat so-called food deserts. And she worked to transfer ownership of property near the Navy Yard from to the City, which paved the path to open a supermarket serving nearby public housing residents.

But the big game is the farm bill. Congress expected to have a new version signed into law before fall, but the House leadership declined to bring its bill up for a vote. While farm bill negotiations have always been arduous, an analysis by Politico of the last 50 years of farm bill horse-trading showed that it has never been this tortured, this stuck in the mud. As of this writing, we are operating without a farm bill: The 2008 bill expired on September 30, and Congressional soothsayers are trying to divine if a bill can be passed before January, if the 2008 bill will get a year’s extension or if negotiations will stall even further.

Part of the idea behind broadening the farm bill (Michael Pollan would like to see it rechristened the “food bill”) is to consider eaters’ interests, not just farmers’. Senator Gillibrand’s advocacy for real food, grown outside the industrial agriculture model, has her standing athwart the farm bill’s history, and has placed her at odds with a number of her Senate colleagues. Yet, despite her junior status on the committee, Gillibrand has managed to influence debate on key components of the bill. She worked to defend programs that, since the late 1990s, have shifted a portion of the funds subsidizing animal feed and other commodity crops toward programs supporting fresh fruits and vegetables people actually eat.

The 2008 farm bill—with a significant push from then-New York Senator Clinton—saw the first significant funds allocated to value-added market development grants and other programs assisting vintners, small-scale cheesemakers, brewers and the like. “These are all new sources of money available to growers outside of the Midwest,” said Jim Tresize of the New York Wine & Grape Foundation, noting that the program has been particularly helpful to winemakers in California and New York. The as-yet-unpassed 2012 bill would continue to support such programs, but a year extension would cut off funding, because only the larger provisions of the bill are covered in an extension.

For the 2012 bill, Gillibrand supported legislation that helped create the first crop insurance plans and disaster assistance for fruit and produce growers, similar to protections long available to the industrial producers of corn, wheat, cotton, soy and rice, and setting the precedent for dismantling the entrenched favortism of only these big five crops. Consider the devastation wrought by Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee across New York in 2011. Despite catastrophic damage, those farms “didn’t have any crop insurance because they would never get a pay-out … because of how the policy’s been written,” said Gillibrand. “It was largely written for commodity crops.”

As the 2012 farm bill approached, Gillibrand held listening sessions—at organic farms and yogurt plants, filled with rapid-fire questions and discussion on everything from factory farming (and how to replace it) to military operations in Afghanistan (and how growing food could be part of the healing process for veterans).

While Gillibrand is working to make federal ag policy more helpful to small New York farms, one enormous program within the farm bill is well-known in cities: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), popularly known as food stamps.

Gillibrand’s effort to avoid cuts to SNAP in this year’s farm bill, at a time in which the lagging economy has increased the need for nutritional aid, has put her at odds with self-proclaimed budget hawks and the increasingly vocal contingent of the Republican party that decries government assistance as socialism.

At a time of high unemployment and poverty rates, Gillibrand has pushed relentlessly to expand the ability of state and community governments to provide food to the poor. Thinking of the 25 million Americans who live in “food deserts,” Gillibrand pushed a provision that would provide $125 million in grants and loans to help bring these communities more grocery stores, farmers markets and other healthful alternatives to the siren call of fast food. And she has been the most vocal legislative opponent of slashing food assistance programs, earning her the epithet of “Food Stamps Queen” from the Wall Street Journal editorial page. In June, Gillibrand proposed an amendment to the Senate bill that would restore the $4.5 billion in cuts to SNAP by reducing subsidies for insurance companies that offer crop insurance. The Senate rejected the amendment by a vote of 66 to 33. As of this writing, the $4.5 billion cuts remain in the Senate bill, and Gillibrand may have to set her sights instead on resisting the more draconian $33 billion cuts to food stamps in the House’s bill.

“Gillibrand has played a very courageous role this time around,” said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, the leading nonprofit lobbying for farm bill reform. “Her amendment helped set the stage for several other insurance reform amendments that did win. We consider Gillibrand as a very important emerging leader for the food movement in Congress.”

Is the food movement for real? Michael Pollan’s October Times piece asked precisely that question, noting that while Americans are increasingly changing the way they eat, it’s unclear whether such actions will coalesce into real political change. But Senator Gillibrand is banking on the fact that her constituents will connect the dots on healthcare, climate change, job creation and even homeland security—all tied closely to food policy. And in the meantime, she’s already hard at work. As her August visit to Quail Hill Farm drew to a close, Gillibrand’s staff checked their watches. The Senator was expected at a lunch on the other side of the Long Island Sound. But before departing, she donned a sun hat and joined the crowd for a tour of the farm’s bee yard. When the beekeeper lifted a hive’s cover and bees poured out, everyone hesitated. “Bees are your constituents, too, Senator,” someone shouted out to laughter. “I know,” the Senator replied with a smile, and stepped closer to peer into the honey-filled hive, undaunted.

Photograph courtesy of Senator Gillibrand

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Flatbush Fig Farm: A Family Business Takes Root- And Branches Out

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Flatbush Fig Farm is the perfect triple-bottom-line business, with one small catch: This year they plan to spend roughly half their profits on a Death Star. But never fear—their Star Wars aspirations are Lego in nature, and the other half of their earnings will be donated to the Flatbush Community Garden.

Nelson Ryland runs the “farm” with his two oldest sons, Jack, 6, and Sam, 4. To date, they’ve sold more than 50 trees and tree cuttings and given away another 40. While most of the trees have stayed local (Nelson is a bit worried the neighborhood is reaching its fig tree capacity), a few have traveled as far as Alaska, Delhi and Germany.

When I visited the company headquarters—a beautiful Victorian house in Ditmas Park—Jack and Sam were busy building a Lego Millennium Falcon, but evidence of agricultural labor was spread out all around them in the form of 100-plus fig tree cuttings in clear glass jars. The transformation from stick to fruit is an easy one, says Sam: “We cut the fig [trees], then we wait until the leaves pop up, then after the leaves on the figs pop, we eat the figs.”

It isn’t quite that fast and easy, but almost. In fact, the farm’s first encounter with fig propagation was accidental.

When Nelson and his wife, Rebekah, moved into their home in late 2005, he cut down a large mystery tree that was crowding the house and threw the branches in their makeshift compost pile. The following year, the discarded branches took root in the compost pile, and the old stump sent up new branches. When dark purple figs appeared on the original tree that September, Nelson realized his cast-offs had delicious potential.

Admittedly not a fig expert, Nelson reached out to online fig forums (yes, they exist), where he ignited a spirited debate over the variety of his tree. There was no consensus, so he named it a Flatbush Dark in honor of the neighborhood. He is quick to extoll its virtues.

“A lot of the figs [trees] that you buy aren’t East Coast winter hardy, but you don’t have to wrap these up in cold weather,” he says. “They are the most forgiving trees ever.”

And the fruit?

“I liked figs, but I didn’t have a big personal connection to them until I started eating these, and they were just so damn good.”

While Nelson’s first harvest of trees was accidental, he now has a system that he uses to propagate both the tree in his yard and a fig tree in his community garden that a neighbor christened a Flatbush White on account of its pale green fruit. He trims both trees during the dormant winter season and places the cuttings in water until they develop a small root system, after which they can be planted in pots.

He decided to turn his discovery into a business a couple years ago as a way to share his love of gardening with his sons while teaching them about responsible entrepreneurship. The farm’s business plan has a lot going for it. Cuttings sell for $20 each and potted trees are $30 or $50 depending on size. The tree cuttings are a free, renewable resource and, according to the fig forums, their product is one-of-a-kind. The pots they use are discards from a local nursery, and even the small metal labels that distinguish the Flatbush Whites from the Flatbush Darks are made from recycled beer cans that Nelson and the boys carefully hammer letters into, one by one, using an antique letter punch. So far soil has been their only expense, but they recently bought a rotating composter with the hope of producing some of their own and buying the rest from their community garden.

But before you buy stock in the farm, you should know they have no plans to expand.

“I’m running out of real estate in my house to do this, and my wife is sort of running out of patience for the whole fig business. But I think there is room on the piano—I think I can get maybe 40 or 50 more cuttings in,” Nelson says.

Distribution is also an obstacle. Nelson has a great relationship with local bar/flower shop Stems (located inside Sycamore), on Cortelyou Road, where he sold 20 cuttings and several trees last spring, but when orders come in from further afield, things can get a bit tricky.

“A guy from New Jersey wanted to buy a fig tree, so I actually had him meet me at my office in Manhattan, and I commuted in with two fig trees on my lap.”

Willing farm labor and the ability to bond with his sons over tree cuttings is another variable that Nelson knows will evolve as the children grow out of their “dad worship” phase and develop new interests. Luckily, his youngest son, Reid, still a toddler, is waiting in the wings to become a full partner in the farm. And, where bonding is concerned, trees are hardly the only interest the Ryland men share.

“We’ve got the vampire castle,” Jack says.

Nelson pulls up a picture of the Lego castle on his iPhone while Sam runs upstairs to get one of their other prized constructions, a green “ninja dragon.”

“The tail is the annoyingest part,” Sam says.

“Because it breaks,” Nelson explains.

The dragon is capable of shooting a marble out of two of its three heads, so an imperfect tail is easy to overlook.

Some of the saplings across the room from the Lego workstation already have knobby buds where their roots are forming. With any luck, the Death Star will be within reach in just a few months.

Photo credit: Nelson Ryland

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In Flatbush, a Farmhouse

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A Colonial farmhouse stands in East Flatbush, and it smells like jerk chicken.

Tucked between the aromatic Footprints Caribbean Café and the American Best Car Wash is an out-of-place verdant hollow with a small wooden structure, a thriving garden and a very long legacy. This isn’t some installation art or hipster ode to urban food justice. It’s a bona fide historic farmhouse that was built in 1652, making it the oldest building in New York State.

Formally known as the Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House, it was built when Dutch and German tenant farmers such as Claesen were establishing the town of Nieuw Amersfoort, later known as the Flatlands section of Brooklyn. For nearly 250 years the Wyckoff family farmed their immigrant ancestor’s 300 acres here, harvesting grains to take to Manhattan markets by ferry. They were not alone: right up through the 19th century, Brooklyn was fertile farm country—and not of the rooftop kind.

The Brooklyn Bridge and Long Island Rail Road spurred the area’s original gentrification, but Flatlands took longer to be urbanized, as Joshua Van Kirk, the director of the Wyckoff House Museum explains: Brooklyn’s south shore didn’t get a street grid until the 1920s, when it became a Levittown-like suburb. These homes, occupied by waves of immigrants from Greece, Italy, Eastern Europe and, most recently, the West Indies, today share their streets with factories, bus depots and the old LIRR tracks. Forget ferries: the neighborhood is now served by the B8 bus (take the B, Q, 2 or 5 trains to connect). There’s little left that looks like New Amsterdam, and even less that looks like agriculture: the Ba-Tampte Pickle plant at the nearby Brooklyn Terminal Market doesn’t count.

But the Wyckoff House still stands. The land might have become an auto parts dealership but because Wyckoff descendants donated it to the city for use as a historic house museum and city park, it remains home to shade trees, garden beds, a sunflower maze and a well-loved fire pit in the farmhouse’s spacious front yard. Under the house’s flared eaves you’ll find a memorial herb garden instead of a sidewalk; if you’re lucky, you’ll also find Sylvia, the farmhouse’s resident cat, sunning herself on the path of crushed clamshells. Are we even still in Brooklyn?

A resounding “Yes,” says Jason Gaspar, Wyckoff’s full-time gardener and creator of the museum’s many education programs for children and families, including the Breukelen Farmers Summer Camp, and the annual Breukelen County Fair, a fall celebration of crafts, music and hand-pressed cider. “Brooklyn is an ecosystem,” Gaspar insists, “at the same time that it is a dense urban space,” and the Wyckoff Farmhouse is in a unique situation to showcase that ecosystem. To this end, he has planted several gardens that illustrate the borough’s Native American and Colonial past, including a “weed garden,” featuring plants widely reviled by gardeners: chickweed, mullein, narrow and broadleaf plantain (also called White Man’s Foot), wild onions and burdock.

“People put poison on non-native plants now,” Gaspar says, “but some of these ‘weeds’ were used to heal wounds. It’s our job to recontextualize them and share their stories.”

A demonstration garden features many heirloom vegetables (and one actual heirloom, a hearty gooseberry bush of unknown age). The only fertilizer is compost, and for pest repellent, Gaspar relies on cayenne pepper (squirrels hate it), homegrown basil (which he shares with the Footprints Café) and the beneficial insects that return to the corner of Clarendon and Ralph every spring. “Ladybugs know they have a home here,” he says with evident pleasure, pointing out that what New Yorkers fetishize as organic farming was once just plain farming.

Children who attend the Breukelen Farmers Summer Camp grow tomatoes, sunflowers and corn, including one ancient variety, Lenape Blue Flour, which likely predates even Pieter Claesen himself. Young gardeners are fascinated by the heirloom yellow cucumbers, while a nearby bodega surprises its customers with farmhouse-grown lettuces and tomatoes on their sandwiches each summer. The neighborhood block association also has a garden plot here, as does Sustainable Flatbush, which is adding a hydroponic system to its beds this summer with the help of Boswyck Farm.

One of this summer’s projects is a “dye garden,” featuring plants used to color cloth, such as Coreopsis tinctoria (mahogany red), indigo, dyer’s woad (blue), Hopi Black Dye sunflower (purple) and the evocatively named Our Lady’s Bedstraw (yellow and red). The garden brings ancient practices to life for 21st-century visitors, but it also serves as a reminder of the neighborhood’s more recent—and more toxic—past, when the Beckers Aniline and Chemical Works plant was across the street, the sole manufacturer of the synthetic Chrome B Blue dye for American sailors’ uniforms during World War I.

The plant’s runoff helped kill the oyster population in Jamaica Bay—bivalves whose ancestors the Wyckoff family once feasted on. Beckers Aniline has long since shuttered, its headquarters now home to a branch of National Grid, but the little farmhouse it once dwarfed remains, its renewed vibrance a testament to sustainability of a different kind.

Photo credit: Emily Dryden

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FROM EDIBLE LONG ISLAND: Eat Like a Greek

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From Edible Long Island:

The image of tossing and watering seeds in perfectly plump green field, wearing a trendy straw hat and carrying a basket brimming with colorful fruits is enough to turn almost anyone into a farmer. The reality is hair green with pollen, dirty finger nails and an achy lower back at the modest age of 23. Manicures are a memory long forgotten. As Marilee Foster can attest, slender sundresses are but a fantasy when you’re knee-deep in manure on a 90-degree day.

When you go into farming, you leave many luxuries behind. For example, standing upright for the majority of the day. Or perhaps even sitting. Nevertheless, farmers everywhere push through the heat reminding themselves of the satisfaction of the juice of a freshly harvested watermelon dripping from the wedge onto their sun-kissed cheeks. That is, until their moment is ruined by the realization that weeds are taking over the kale patch.

Weeding is one of the wonderful tasks of farming that most farmers are happy to hand over to the nearest willing volunteer. Organic farming, especially, can mean tugging and plucking for hours on end. Most weeds are composted. Many are cursed. Some are even stomped on. However, there are few that are cherished such as vlita.

Greek for amaranth, vlita a nutritious and native weed treasured by Greeks like the Bolkas family of Thera Farms in Ronkonkoma. The bushy 3- to 10-foot plant is a welcome annoyance on their two-acre farm. After hours of weeding and a broken back, you better think twice about throwing away this super weed. Especially if Mrs. Bolkas catches you.

“The Greek people go crazy over this stuff!” she says, sorting through a wilted pile of the red-stemmed greens. “They drive very far to find farms that grow it!” While the vegetable rows may look immaculate, the job of weeding on Thera Farms doesn’t finish until she gets her amaranth.

Amaranth’s highly sought after seeds are high in protein, amino acids, fiber, iron, potassium and vitamins, making it a nutritious substitute for grains. Its edible stem and leaves have healthy heart and kidney benefits and a sweet flavor similar to spinach when cooked. It is easy to harvest and can be identified by its notched green leaves and red color at the bottom of the stem. Simply pull and wash, but don’t trim too much as the red part is tastiest.

Be cautious of the spines on the leaves of some species, but do not fear, for amaranth is not poisonous. It thrives in nitrogen-rich soils, which may leave trace amounts of nitrates in the leaves, so it must be cooked. Mrs. Bolkas recommends boiling, straining and letting it cool and then tossing it with olive oil, raw garlic, white vinegar and salt and pepper for a tasty summer salad.
While you’re probably still not eager to go out and weed for the next day and a half, know that if you do you might stumble upon this famous wild edible. If you can’t find it in your own yard, you can get some from Thera Farms, either at the farmers market or right from the farm. Put on your sunscreen and go get some dirt under your fingernails. There are weeds to be eaten.

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Here’s to You, Bill Maxwell — Greenmarket Veteran to Retire

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bill_maxwell_48_cropped Scott Gordon BleisherIf you frequent the Grand Army Plaza, Union Square or UN markets, then you may have seen his sprawling stand. If you’ve dined at Franny’s, ABC Kitchen, ABC Cocina, or any of Peter Hoffman’s Back Forty spots, then you may have eaten the products of his labor. On a larger scale, if you care about the local food movement in Brooklyn (or, heck, the whole of New York), then you should thank farmer Bill Maxwell, who has been selling at the Greenmarkets for three decades.

As our own Rachel Wharton reported earlier this week in the New York Times, Bill will retire next month. We’re long time fans of his work and even had the great honor of publishing one of his stories back in 2010.

As he prepares for retirement, we want to express our gratitude for his important and influential work promoting local food systems. Here’s to hoping for more trailblazers like you, Bill!

The post Here’s to You, Bill Maxwell — Greenmarket Veteran to Retire appeared first on Edible Brooklyn.

What’s in Season: January 7, 2014

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Welcome to the polar vortex, folks. We’ve got some single-digit temperatures out there this morning that will somehow drastically swing into the 50s by the weekend if all goes as predicted. Erratic, much?

Many of us have the luxury of sitting at our desks right now, but our local farmers are out there harvesting their season’s best. Curious about what you can expect from nearby farms this week? Here’s what Fishkill Farms based in East Fishkill, NY, has to offer:

Golden Delicious apples (an ingredient in this recipe for roasted parsnip and sweet potato soup with fresh apple salsa from the Edible Brooklyn Cookbook):

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Good Eggs  

Red Kabocha squash:

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Good Eggs

Pasture-raised eggs (this recipe for April Bloomfield’s deviled eggs is good all year long):

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Good Eggs

Cider (our sister pub Edible Manhattan just released helpful suggestions for cider and cheese pairings):

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Good Eggs

Kennebec White potatoes:

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Farmer’s Pick Box:

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Good Eggs

This post was written in collaboration with Brooklyn-based Good EggsYou can read more about Fishkill Farms and learn about other seasonal ingredients on their website.

We’re sharing our seasonal stories, too. Check out our “What’s in Season?” section of our sidebar (to the right) for some of the best of our timely content.

The post What’s in Season: January 7, 2014 appeared first on Edible Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Grange’s City Growers Program Challenges Kids to Think Outside the Box

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Visiting students investigate a worm bin with City Growers. (Photo courtesy of Cara Chard)

In 2010, the Brooklyn Grange arrived in New York, promising city-grown produce from the previously unharnessed rooftop of the Standard Motor Products building in Long Island City; and then, in 2012, from the roof of Building no. 3 in the Brooklyn Navy Yards, too. And as soon as there were farms, there were hungry and curious city folk clambering to get a look at and a taste of New York City’s first commercial, for-profit rooftop farms. An overwhelming amount of the interest came from community groups and school groups that wanted to show city kids what a farm — especially a farm as urban-minded as the kids themselves — is like.

“We were bringing groups up for tours, but soon realized that we couldn’t meet the demand,” said Anastasia Cole Plakias, the Grange’s vice president and one of its three co-founders. “We realized it wasn’t our wheelhouse — none of us are trained educators.”

Thanks to Grange co-founder Gwen Schantz, now the farm’s COO, who has a background in nonprofit work and development, the Grange secured a grant through the Greening Western Queens Fund. “Enter Cara Chard,” said Cole Plakias, “and here we are four years later, and City Growers has hosted over 10,000 New York City youths on the farm.”

City Growers is the name of the Grange’s nonprofit cohort, its educational program that turns both farms into a “learning laboratory,” said Cara Chard, who is at the organization’s helm. Chard was a school teacher in New York City before delving into urban agriculture, “and [food education] was definitely not happening when I was there [in the schools]… I’m just excited that even teachers are taking steps to include agriculture and urban farms in the classroom. I think it means good things for the food movement, and it’ll help these kids have a better sense of not only environmental education but food education.”

With its two full-time employees leading the charge, City Growers tackles the project of showing New York City students of all ages what farming is, how it works and why it should matter to them. “We give students the opportunity to have experiential, hands-on learning in the garden to reinforce what they’re learning in school — biology, ecology, food systems, nutrition education — and get to encourage them to explore the intersection between ecology and health. What’s good for our environment is also good for our bodies,” said Chard. “We’re trying to get kids to come to their own conclusions, and giving them the opportunity to engage on the farm.”

Thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign last fall, City Growers has grown from two to five programs, each geared toward introducing New York City children to urban agriculture and the relationship between farm and fork: Farm Explorer, a basic introduction to farming; Insect Investigator, which educates participants on farm bugs both beneficial and pesky; Honeybee Education, which allows students to peer inside one of the farm’s active beehives; Rainbow on Your Plate, a farm-to-table education program; and Growing Urban Farmers, a sort of urban farming boot camp.

Chard, a self-proclaimed “bee nerd” and experienced beekeeper, is most excited about Honeybee Education. “We’ll have an observation hive,” she explained of the class. “How that works is that there’s essentially a glass structure that is built to hold multiple frames of live bees. You go into regular hives and pull out frames of bees and place them in the observation hive… In the observation hive, you can watch baby bees being born, which is really cool. It’s cool to share with these little kids.”

Both she and Cole Plakias emphasized the importance of exposing the visiting children to the bees, as well as to other insects on the farm. Awareness, and combatting a fear of bees and other insects, is crucial not only to supporting bees and other communities of beneficial insects, but also to illustrating a necessary and often unseen part of the food production process.

Cole Plakias, who grew up in New York City, remembers being terrified of bees as a kid. “I was really quite scared of bees, thought worms were disgusting and soil was dirty. We can challenge these preconceived notions that New York City kids hold,” she said. “The only insect interactions they have are with bothersome insects in their apartments, like cockroaches. So seeing them interact with the insect world in a positive way is really great — just being in nature in general.”

Cole Plakias also recalled a visiting student in pre-City Growers days who, when asked by Cole Plakias if he was studying the environment in school, said yes before telling a startled Cole Plakias, “That has nothing to do with us. That’s out there in the country with trees and stuff.”

“Their whole lives are sort of in boxes,” said Cole Plakias, “the apartment, the elevator, and lobby, the subway. Over half the youth in the world might have this life where they’re devoid of experience in the natural world. But it’s really important that we stress this experience with the environment. If we can get kids thinking about how urban and natural environments interact and how the effects of that relationship present themselves, maybe we can get them to effect the necessary changes.”

City Growers encourages its visiting students to think outside of those boxes; there’s as much learning as unlearning to be done when the children visit the farms and are challenged to think about the natural world differently. “There are all kinds of little victories,” said Chard, “like realizing that a kid might be a future leader in the food or environmental movement, or there are the victories of getting a kid to put her professionally manicured hands in the soil and realize that it’s life-giving instead of something to avoid.”

And this is what’s at the heart of City Growers’ lessons: “It’s instilling a sense of wonder for nature, for where our food comes from,” said Chard, who feels that this is the most rewarding work she could have dreamed up, and who has seen bug-shy third graders’ delight at worm balls (exactly what it sounds like: a writhing, baseball-sized cluster of earthworms) and surly high schoolers become starry-eyed while working on the farm. “Farm education kind of naturally instills a sense of wonder, but that we’re on the Brooklyn Grange, and there are these absolutely gorgeous rooftop farms with a beautiful skyline — it definitely facilitates that. All kids are naturally curious, and awakening that and celebrating that are our main objectives. We have a lot of problems with our food system, so we want these kids to think of themselves as future problem solvers of these issues.”

Chard and the City Growers team are passionate about being able to provide these programs and experiences for free; a kid’s excitement about agriculture and the environment should not be hampered just because he or she doesn’t have a backyard or a house in the country. Thanks to donations (learn more about sponsoring a class here) they’ve been able to do so, and over 85 percent of the programs’ participants are from Title I public schools, which have particularly high concentrations of low-income or homeless students.

“It’s so rewarding to be able to do this for kids who don’t have as much access to the outdoors,” said Chard. “It’s a way of really giving back, and you can see exactly where your $20 is going: you’re giving kids an opportunity to really dig and to find the worm ball.”

Cole Plakias echoed the sentiment, and is grateful for City Growers’ presence on and relationship with the Brooklyn Grange: “[City Growers] was so close to the heart of what we wanted to do with the farm. We’re not just a production-based organization. We wanted to give back to the community that was so supportive of us when we were starting out.”

The post Brooklyn Grange’s City Growers Program Challenges Kids to Think Outside the Box appeared first on Edible Brooklyn.

VIDEO: Learn More About the Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm

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We first wrote about its farmer Ben Flanner five years ago, when he and Annie Novak were raising (food on) the roof at Eagle Street Farm, blazing the trail straight skyward. They’ve come a long way — as evidenced in this time-lapse video of their first seven months at the Grange.

But as we explored in our current pages, that sky-high project isn’t just growing great food. It’s helping refugees put down roots, too.

Thanks to a partnership with the Refugee and Immigrant Fund, transplanted people with farming backgrounds spend Wednesdays planting seeds and practicing English on a farm that feels familiar, albeit with breathtaking skyline views. And the weekly pot-luck lunch uses many fruits of the farm’s labor but is now also redolent with international flavors, from fish powder to surprisingly sour leaves.

Contributor Kyle Ligman, who reported and co-wrote the story, even cooked with one project participant, whom we call Anna. As written in the story:

Anna is also passionate about sharing her Burkinabé culture through cooking and a recent Wednesday afternoon found her flipping oblong balls of cornmeal with a bamboo spoon to make fufu, a side dish for her leaf soup, kanzaga, named for the vegetable traditionally used in the recipe back home. Now that she lives and farms here, Anna has been adding all sorts of different leafy greens to her soup including bok choy and amaranth.

She says not wasting even a leaf is a sign of respect for the food, which she learned at a young age.

“The food could be older than you,” Anna said they tell children in Burkina Faso. Now she passes on recipes — and the underlying respect — to others. It is a melting pot of culture where innovative ideas can come from surprising places, like leaves that would have gone to waste.

Here are photos of Anna transforming the farm’s overgrown kale and mustard leaves, typically sent to the compost pile, into kanzaga: a slow-cooked dish she learned to love back in her native Burkina Faso.

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The dish begins with overgrown kale and mustard leaves…

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…which Anna spikes with chili pepper paste…

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…slow cooked, the way she learned back in Burkina Faso…

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…a taste of home, grown in Brooklyn.

Photo credit: Kyle Ligman

The post VIDEO: Learn More About the Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm appeared first on Edible Brooklyn.

You Say October, We Say Goatober: Our Editors’ Thoughts on Why You Should Eat More Goat

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Did you know that goat meat is in fact the most popular protein around the world? It’s a lean, nutritious source of meat and has a lower carbon footprint than beef, pork and lamb. But in the US, we rarely eat it. If we’re all having a hard time imagining a cheese plate without goat cheese, we don’t feel like something is missing when there’s no goat meat on the menu.

However, there’s no goat cheese without goat meat. In order to produce milk, a female goat has to have babies. Typically, goats are born as a set of twins — one male, one female. Thus, for every female used for dairy, there’s a male left. Most males in the US get killed at birth because there’s no demand for them and it gets therefore too expensive to raise them.

How can we change this? Our editors have some ideas:

Gabrielle Langholtz
Of all the headlines I’ve written in my decade at Edible, I’m most proud of the one I typed across our op-ed(ible) about the glut of boy goats born on milk dairies: Billy the Kid: Not Wanted Dead or Alive. But when it comes to spreading the goat-meat gospel, I hadn’t expected the staid Economist to beat my wit. Their great little piece observing the recent rise in demand — and the potential for way more — bested my pun. “The Kids are All Right,” they called it. Nice. Plus, being The Economist, they cite stats. Like, “From 1987 to January 2013 the number of meat goats on American farms rose from roughly 415,000 to 2.3m.” I’ll chew on that while tucking into some tender goat chops this weekend. Because, as The Economist so rightly explained, “a young cabrito has a clean, grassy, herbal flavour, sweeter and less greasy than beef.” Such reporting should help convery the neigh-sayers. (Couldn’t help it.)

Eileen M. Duffy
#Goatober is a new one on me, but on the East End, we’ve been writing about goats pretty much since the start of the magazine in 2005. In spring 2006 I visited Karen Catapano, who was one of the first livestock farmers on the North Fork and definitely the first person to raise goats to make cheese. Lucky for me, it was just after the birth of that year’s kids. They were so soft and sweet and Karen loved them. In 2010, I got to meet Lynn Fleming, owner of Lynnhaven goat farm upstate, who was at the old Almond space in western Bridgehampton for a goat dinner sponsored by Slow Food. Chef Jason Weiner made a full goat menu. Fleming was so lovely, and the photo she sent, taken by a worker on the farm, is so expressive of her love for her kids.

Karen Catapano feeding her babies

Karen Catapano feeding her babies

Lynn Fleming, owner of Lynnhaven goat farm upstate

Lynn Fleming, owner of Lynnhaven goat farm upstate

Eleonore Buschinger
To be honest, I had never eaten goat meat until last week. Tons of delicate goat cheese but no goat meat. I hadn’t actually even realized the fact that there’s no goat cheese without goat meat. In fact, in order to produce milk, a female goat has to have babies. Typically, goats are born as a set of twins – one male, one female. Thus, for every female used for dairy, there’s a male left. This simple but decisive detail was like an epiphany to me: I had to try goat meat. So I went to Trinidad Ali’s Roti Shop in Brooklyn and got a goat roti. The meat was absolutely gorgeous, stewed in a variety of spices with a strong taste of cloves. Next goat adventure: try this roasted goat leg recipe. It’sgoatta be good!

Carrington MorrisThe Growing Demand for Goat Meat, The Atlantic
This article points to the beginning of goat meat’s gradual integration into American diets. Described as the “soccer of meat” for its wild popularity in all countries but ours, as with soccer that status has been changing fast. This dream meat is “lower in fat than chicken and higher in protein than beef,” and craggy Northeast terrain is particularly well suited to raising goats. The best goat meat in town I’ve found comes from Consider Bardwell‘s stand at the Union Square Greenmarket, where this time of year, if you’re lucky, you can pick up a goat chop from their limited supply in a cooler beneath their regular cheese stand.

Featured photo credit: Flickr/eviltomthai

The post You Say October, We Say Goatober: Our Editors’ Thoughts on Why You Should Eat More Goat appeared first on Edible Brooklyn.





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