[Editor’s Note: I worked briefly at The Cleaver Company as an extern. My time there was cut short (pun alert!) when I snipped off the tip of my finger while chopping candied ginger for a dessert. Unfortunately I didn’t return, except as a customer at the neighboring Green Table.
These excerpts are from a talk that Cleaver gave as the first recipient of Slow Food NYC’s Snail Blazer Award at the organization’s annual gala.]
“As a chef and businessperson I practice seriously and embrace the ability and responsibility we have — the difference we can make — by consciously directing our food dollars.
I was fortunate to be raised on good food. I grew up cooking for pleasure and as a way of contributing to the family. We had large gatherings every summer on the shores of Buzzard’s Bay in southeastern Massachusetts, and feasted on corn picked just before dawn, clams dug from the sands of the tidal ponds, mussels harvested from the rocks by the creek, and seafood just off the boats of the then-formidable New Bedford fleets. I discovered that I enjoyed cooking for a crowd: I loved the camaraderie and cacophony of a well-fed group around a big table. I found that good food was appreciated and valuable; that it fed good spirits. That it was nurturing.
When I finished college in southern Vermont I wanted to buy a farm, raise goats and make goat cheese, but my intelligent partner of these past 35 years, Ashley Hollister, pointed out that I did not have the funds or skills to do that — so instead we moved to the marketplace of New York City to find jobs. I started out washing dishes in a fancy food shop, and it wasn’t long before I discovered I could make a living by cooking for people gathered around a big table. Continue reading Chef Mary Cleaver: The Creation of a Snail Blazer
One day, there is a luxurious green meadow tasseled with wild flowers. The next day, after the tractor has gone, everything is neatly shorn. Wildness replaced by a playing field.
And at the edge of the field, you might see neat 1,200-pound round bales of hay wrapped in white plastic. It’s as if, my daughter once noted, a giant has strewn about a bag of huge marshmallows.
Hay—basically dried grasses and plants—is the single most important source of nutrition for animals in the winter months, or when access to good pasture grass is limited. A dairy farmer, for example, needs an acre of pasture per cow. If she is running a hundred head in New England, it may be hard to find that much pasture in one spot. Hay to the rescue. Continue reading Hay is for Horses. Donkeys Goats, Too.
Sourcing products from local purveyors is no longer the next big thing. In fact name chefs like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, Peter Hoffman of Savoy, and Dan Barber of Blue Hill have all been working with local farmers and producers for more than 20 years. A trend identified two years ago by the National Restaurant Association — local sourcing — is here to stay.
What is unusual is to find a restauranteur inspired by the farmers he meets (or perhaps a mid-life crisis) who decides to take up farming. For the last 13 years Mark Firth has been a successful restauranteur in Brooklyn’s demanding food scene who turned recently to farming in The Berkshires, a bucolic part of Western Massachusetts where Dan Barber also hails from.
Not everyone encouraged him to head down this path. A German chef at a Slow Food event said: “You’re taking two businesses with the lowest returns — farming and restaurants —and combining them. I think that’s a bad idea.” Mark took that as a challenge. “You know everything we’ve done people have told us is a bad idea so I said let’s do it. But I wouldn’t underestimate the amount of work raising a garden and maintaining a restaurant that is consistently good.”
When you think about greenhouse farming you probably get the image of hothouse tomatoes. In fact there is a giant greenhouse in Madison, Maine run by Backyard Farms that year-round produces many of the tomatoes eaten on the East Coast. We no longer need to settle for hard pink tomatoes—picked green in Florida and shipped by truck, that taste like cardboard.
Greenhouse farmers are exploring new types of growing, including hydrodynamics and the vertical greenhouse farms that Backyard Farms employs. Theoretically, a greenhouse farm can be located in the desert or on the roof of an office building in midtown Manhattan.
Greenhouse Farming a Business and an Art
Jack Algiers of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, NY has a stunning greenhouse with plants bedded in soil. The level of analysis and detail that goes into running his operation is extraordinary. It has to be: Of 22,00 square feet in the greenhouse, he can farm on just 13,000 square feet, or less than a quarter-acre. To make the most of this land, Jack harvests twice a week year round. He calculates the output of his greenhouse down to the square foot., andhe’s ready to share this information with other farmers to give a full sense of the productivity for this type of farming.
It helps that Jack is selling to Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Dan Barber’s fabled restaurant. But Blue Hill is only one of many buyers Jack needs to satisfy at a price that consumers and restaurants can pay. To meet Jack and view the greenhouse and farm visit the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture.
Didn’t know there was a war on in the United States? Well there is a battle for good, locally produced food.
Have you read about Victory Gardens? The World War generations experienced something amazing that has conveniently been erased from our country’s collective memory: When called upon during times of conflict, Americans stood up and did their patriotic duty by cultivating a garden.
Millions of pounds of fresh food and produce were raised during the war years—as much as 40% of all vegetables consumed nationally.
5,285,000 Victory Gardens in the United States
According to The War Garden Victorious, Indianapolis “estimated the value of its war-garden crop in 1918 at $1,473,165. Denver placed its yield at $2,500,000 and Los Angeles at $1,000,000. Washington, District of Columbia reached $1,396,5000.”
Thanks to propaganda (“your garden is a munitions plant”) there were 5,285,000 victory gardens in 1918. The City of Rochester, New York alone had more than 15,000. The “estimated value of our war-garden crops for 1918 (was) $525,000,000! A half billion dollars!”
Before you get visions of Mike Meyers as Dr Evil, let’s quickly translate that figure into 2010 dollars. A half billion dollars in 1918 would be worth $7,875,000,000 today. And that’s not small potatoes. Continue reading Community Gardens Win the Food Wars
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