Brooklyn Locavore: May 2010

Monday, May 10, 2010

A Farm-to-Table Restaurant

Richard Holcomb, Jamie DeMent and the chef Marco Shaw at Coon Rock Farm.

NEW YORK TIMES FIELD REPORT

Fresh Direction: A Farm-to-Table Restaurant

By CHRISTINE MUHLKE

Published: April 19, 2010

On a March morning at Coon Rock Farm — 55 acres of just about everything you can grow and raise — in Hillsborough, N.C., Jamie DeMent is showing me a fallen tree that’s being milled into tabletops for the farm’s biggest project to date: Eno Restaurant and Market.

Who knew the farm-to-table loop would become so compressed or so literal? But it was only a matter of time before the farmers’ market evolved into the farmers’ restaurant.

Eno, which is scheduled to open early this summer in downtown Durham, will serve dishes made from Coon Rock’s meat, vegetables, eggs and milk (including from a cow named Eudora — as in Welty). Toward the end of the meal, diners will be handed a dessert menu and a market menu. Liked the pork chop and Russian kale? Take some home and cook them your way. As DeMent envisions it, “You’ll be able to get a little brown bag if you thought that was the greatest pork chop you’ve ever had in your life, which it will be.”

The restaurant’s market area will also sell house-made charcuterie, cheeses and prepared food. Subscribers to Coon Rock’s community-supported agriculture program, or C.S.A., can pick up their weekly allotment there, too. If all goes according to plan, Eno will be like a farm stand with a wine list.

In five years, DeMent and her partner, Richard Holcomb, have traded the world of C.E.O.’s for the world of C.S.A.’s. Holcomb, who grew up on a farm, built several successful software companies. (His father has gone from thinking he’s insane to building a house on the farm.) DeMent, who worked for a congressman on Capitol Hill and in museum fund-raising in North Carolina, says she “led a very prissy existence, in very high heels and very tight skirts.” Today their sustainable farm operates at a befittingly high level, generating enough heritage-breed meat and heirloom vegetables for 300 C.S.A. members and four farmers’ markets in the Raleigh-Durham area, as well as the Raleigh restaurant Zely & Ritz, which Holcomb owns with its chef, Sarig Agasi (who is also a partner in Eno).

“It’s more cool in a lot of ways than it is doing a big deal in Tokyo,” Holcomb says. “You can see the impact you’re having.”

The farm was able to get up to scale quickly — building costly infrastructure and doubling production each season — thanks to Holcomb’s financial stability. And it has built a community of loyal buyers in no small part because of DeMent’s outgoing, how-y’all personality. Together, the couple’s understanding of marketing and business helped them see new opportunities for 21st-century agriculture.

Holcomb bought the run-down farmhouse in 2004 as a weekend place for his children, who weren’t benefiting from life in an 8,000-square-foot house in Country Club Hills. (“The only thing they did was fight, play video games or watch TV,” he recalls.) Within weeks the kids asked to move to the wood-heated house, which was the size of the master bedroom at home. Holcomb used the land to grow vegetables and raise pigs for Zely & Ritz, and soon diners were asking where they could buy the pork and greens. (Holcomb and DeMent met when he overheard her talking about how good the restaurant’s greens were. “Those are my greens,” he said, introducing himself.)

The couple decided it was time to create an even more interactive experience than having Zely & Ritz’s bartender hand over 100 C.S.A. boxes a week. A restaurant on the farm was out. So, Eno. “I wanted you to sit down and feel very, very connected to the region and the food,” DeMent says of the restaurant, which has been delayed by the usual permit snags. “I want it to be obvious. That’s why the tabletops will be made from wood from the farm and the waitstaff’s going to work on the farm” one day a month. “It’s all a way to make people more connected to their food. I think that’s one of the biggest problems in civilization right now — no one is connected to their food anymore. If it comes from a window or in a bag, it’s not food.”

The couple hired the chef Marco Shaw from Portland, Ore., where he owned the farm-to-table restaurant Fife. The classically trained chef was looking for more diversity, in both a city and its restaurant community, and Durham’s revitalized downtown and the region’s vibrant food and farming scene inspired him. Although Shaw knows what it really means to cook seasonally, supplying a restaurant from just one farm will be a challenge. He says that Coon Rock will be able to provide 60 percent of what Eno needs the first year, the goal being 100 percent.

“It’s a whole different mind-set to realize that there will be some days when you don’t have salad greens,” says the dreadlocked chef over a lunch of country-ham sandwiches with mustard-green slaw, sitting on the couch at Coon Rock. “You have to figure out how to make salad from turnip greens — and then sell it. When there’s no celery, how are you going to make stock? How are you going to make sauce when you don’t have onions?” There’s also the question of scaling up production on the farm: “With a 75-seat restaurant open six nights a week, just on dinner, I’ll go through 35 chickens,” he says. “Lunch? That’s potentially 80 chickens a week.”

“I need to order chicks!” Holcomb says.

Holcomb and DeMent know that running a farm-to-table restaurant is about more than flipping through seed catalogs to pick out pretty squash. Their desire to feed people and their business backgrounds might have helped them to hit on a new model.

I ask which is harder, farming or opening a restaurant.

“Farming!” Shaw says.

“Opening a restaurant!” DeMent says. “Chasing pigs isn’t that hard, Marco.”

Sunday, May 9, 2010

'Food Revolution'

TELEVISION REVIEW
Jamie Oliver aims to make school lunches more healthful
In 'Food Revolution,' the British chef hopes to overhaul the menu in Huntington, W.Va.
March 20, 2010|By Mary McNamara television critic

In the film “We Are Marshall,” the town of Huntington, W.Va., reels, then regroups after most of Marshall University's football team is killed in a plane crash. Forty years later, Huntington is at the center of yet another potential turn-around tale. Only this time, rather than a phoenix emerging from the ashes, the image is more of a grilled chicken breast rising from a landfill of deep fryers.
In "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution," the boyish and preternaturally media-friendly British food guru known for a while as "The Naked Chef" because of his penchant for simple food, comes to Huntington in the hopes of transforming the unhealthiest town -- i.e. the fattest town -- in America. After overhauling the menus for the British school system, and with half a dozen TV shows to his credit, Oliver seems just the man for the job.

After a brief wrangle with a hostile local radio talk show host, he attempts to slay the dragon of the local school lunch. It's a brilliant move, narratively speaking. Not only do we meet all the fabulous "lunch ladies," including one Alice Gue, who I am fairly certain ran my elementary school cafeteria, but we also discover there isn't a person alive who won't joyfully bash school cafeteria food.

When Oliver arrives, the kids are all enjoying a hearty breakfast of pizza and/or sugary cereal doused in chocolate or strawberry milk.
"I've never seen pizza served for breakfast," Oliver says in horror (and a tiny bit of hypocrisy -- his website includes a pizza he calls "perfect" for breakfast, although it does include grapes and pine nuts, which the Huntington breakfast pizza most certainly does not.)

Despite an accent that is usually referred to in the U.K. as "mockney" and the product-tousled hair men of his age inexplicably favor, Oliver is eminently and instantly likable. He may in fact wind up being reality TV's most engaging star, equally comfortable talking to people and the camera, capable of evoking and handling an emotional moment with a winning combination of self-confidence and humility.

(It would be nice if he could stop referring to the cafeteria cooks as "girls," but this will undoubtedly be pointed out to him as the season develops -- the look Gue gives him when he refers to her as "lunch lady" practically freezes the camera lens.)

Many of the people Oliver meets in the first episode are, of course, skeptical, bordering on hostile. This being TV, it's difficult to know how much of the tension is scripted -- obviously Huntington invited Oliver and his experiment -- but that doesn't mean the issues Oliver is dealing with aren't real.
No matter where you live, processed food is cheaper and easier to prepare than fresh, and the reason cafeteria food is unhealthful is often because of cost, ease of preparation and children's natural aversion to anything that doesn't include a dipping sauce.
The schools are just the first step in Oliver's revolution. He also plans to teach the community how to prepare healthful meals that "don't cost the earth." As a first step, he takes over the kitchen of the Edwards family, cooking the food they had eaten the previous week -- a table-buckling assortment of fried, refried and heated junk that stands before the mother in greasy accusation. "This food will kill your kids," he tells Staci as her eyes fill with tears.
It's a highly orchestrated moment, but effective nonetheless. As Oliver points out, Huntington is only a few percentage points worse than many other parts of the U.S. And though my family does not own a deep fryer and banished corn dogs years ago, I'm betting I won't be the only mother who surveys the contents of her freezer with growing alarm before racing out to buy fresh vegetables.
So it has the potential to be powerful stuff, "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution," to show rather than tell, to offer a healthful alternative for people without a lot of money or free time, people who do not view heirloom tomatoes or regular use of buckwheat as status symbols.
Still, it's tricky work being a savior. In addition to his small media empire, Oliver runs a program that trains at-risk kids to become chefs, so he does put his money where his mouth is. But when he offers one of the Edwards boys a few one-on-one lessons in the kitchen and possibly a future as one of his chefs, the boy's eyes light up, reminding us and, one hopes, Oliver, that it isn't just junk food weighing down small-town America, but it's also a loss of jobs and possibility.
Like it or not, Oliver represents more than just healthful eating -- as he has made clear in countless interviews, he is a small-town boy who didn't do well in school. But with some talent in the kitchen, a lot of personal magnetism and hard work, he has managed to become rich and something of a hero.
That kind of magic is radiant, tantalizing, and difficult to teach.
Copyright 2010 Los Angeles Times

Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?

Why does a salad cost more than a Big Mac? Part of the reason is that a huge proportion of our food subsidies go to meat while only 0.37 percent go to fruits and vegetables. That makes meat and dairy artificially cheap, so we end up consuming more of it than we should, and getting fatter.

GOOD Blog > Andrew Price on March 13, 2010 at 5:30 am PST

Farmers Cope With Roundup-Resistant Weeds

Christopher Berkey for The New York Times

Jason Hamlin, a certified crop adviser and agronomist, looks for weeds resistant to glyphosate in Dyersburg, Tenn.

By WILLIAM NEUMAN and ANDREW POLLACK

Published: May 3, 2010

DYERSBURG, Tenn. — For 15 years, Eddie Anderson, a farmer, has been a strict adherent of no-till agriculture, an environmentally friendly technique that all but eliminates plowing to curb erosion and the harmful runoff of fertilizers and pesticides.

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Where Weedkiller Won’t Work

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Invasion of the Superweeds

Michael Pollan and others on what Roundup-resistant weeds mean for American agriculture.

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But not this year.

On a recent afternoon here, Mr. Anderson watched as tractors crisscrossed a rolling field — plowing and mixing herbicides into the soil to kill weeds where soybeans will soon be planted.

Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.

To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.

“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years. “We’re trying to find out what works.”

Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higherfood prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.

“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.

The first resistant species to pose a serious threat to agriculture was spotted in a Delaware soybean field in 2000. Since then, the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn.

The superweeds could temper American agriculture’s enthusiasm for some genetically modified crops. Soybeans, corn and cotton that are engineered to survive spraying with Roundup have become standard in American fields. However, if Roundup doesn’t kill the weeds, farmers have little incentive to spend the extra money for the special seeds.

Roundup — originally made by Monsanto but now also sold by others under the generic name glyphosate — has been little short of a miracle chemical for farmers. It kills a broad spectrum of weeds, is easy and safe to work with, and breaks down quickly, reducing its environmental impact.

Sales took off in the late 1990s, after Monsanto created its brand of Roundup Ready crops that were genetically modified to tolerate the chemical, allowing farmers to spray their fields to kill the weeds while leaving the crop unharmed. Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.

But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.

Now, Roundup-resistant weeds like horseweed and giant ragweed are forcing farmers to go back to more expensive techniques that they had long ago abandoned.

Mr. Anderson, the farmer, is wrestling with a particularly tenacious species of glyphosate-resistant pest called Palmer amaranth, or pigweed, whose resistant form began seriously infesting farms in western Tennessee only last year.

Pigweed can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more, choking out crops; it is so sturdy that it can damage harvesting equipment. In an attempt to kill the pest before it becomes that big, Mr. Anderson and his neighbors are plowing their fields and mixing herbicides into the soil.

That threatens to reverse one of the agricultural advances bolstered by the Roundup revolution: minimum-till farming. By combining Roundup and Roundup Ready crops, farmers did not have to plow under the weeds to control them. That reduced erosion, the runoff of chemicals into waterways and the use of fuel for tractors.

If frequent plowing becomes necessary again, “that is certainly a major concern for our environment,” Ken Smith, a weed scientist at the University of Arkansas, said. In addition, some critics of genetically engineered crops say that the use of extra herbicides, including some old ones that are less environmentally tolerable than Roundup, belies the claims made by the biotechnology industry that its crops would be better for the environment.

“The biotech industry is taking us into a more pesticide-dependent agriculture when they’ve always promised, and we need to be going in, the opposite direction,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety in Washington.

So far, weed scientists estimate that the total amount of United States farmland afflicted by Roundup-resistant weeds is relatively small — seven million to 10 million acres, according to Ian Heap, director of the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds, which is financed by the agricultural chemical industry. There are roughly 170 million acres planted with corn, soybeans and cotton, the crops most affected.

Roundup-resistant weeds are also found in several other countries, including Australia, China and Brazil, according to the survey.

Monsanto, which once argued that resistance would not become a major problem, now cautions against exaggerating its impact. “It’s a serious issue, but it’s manageable,” said Rick Cole, who manages weed resistance issues in the United States for the company.

Of course, Monsanto stands to lose a lot of business if farmers use less Roundup and Roundup Ready seeds.

“You’re having to add another product with the Roundup to kill your weeds,” said Steve Doster, a corn and soybean farmer in Barnum, Iowa. “So then why are we buying the Roundup Ready product?”

Monsanto argues that Roundup still controls hundreds of weeds. But the company is concerned enough about the problem that it is taking the extraordinary step of subsidizing cotton farmers’ purchases of competing herbicides to supplement Roundup.

Monsanto and other agricultural biotech companies are also developing genetically engineered crops resistant to other herbicides.

Bayer is already selling cotton and soybeans resistant to glufosinate, another weedkiller. Monsanto’s newest corn is tolerant of both glyphosate and glufosinate, and the company is developing crops resistant to dicamba, an older pesticide. Syngenta is developing soybeans tolerant of its Callisto product. And Dow Chemical is developing corn and soybeans resistant to 2,4-D, a component of Agent Orange, the defoliant used in the Vietnam War.

Still, scientists and farmers say that glyphosate is a once-in-a-century discovery, and steps need to be taken to preserve its effectiveness.

Glyphosate “is as important for reliable global food production as penicillin is for battling disease,” Stephen B. Powles, an Australian weed expert, wrote in a commentary in January in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The National Research Council, which advises the federal government on scientific matters, sounded its own warning last month, saying that the emergence of resistant weeds jeopardized the substantial benefits that genetically engineered crops were providing to farmers and the environment.

Weed scientists are urging farmers to alternate glyphosate with other herbicides. But the price of glyphosate has been falling as competition increases from generic versions, encouraging farmers to keep relying on it.

Something needs to be done, said Louie Perry Jr., a cotton grower whose great-great-grandfather started his farm in Moultrie, Ga., in 1830.

Georgia has been one of the states hit hardest by Roundup-resistant pigweed, and Mr. Perry said the pest could pose as big a threat to cotton farming in the South as the beetle that devastated the industry in the early 20th century.

“If we don’t whip this thing, it’s going to be like the boll weevil did to cotton,” said Mr. Perry, who is also chairman of the Georgia Cotton Commission. “It will take it away.”

Three times a day

•A gallon of oil per pound of beef

•Twenty-five hundred gallons of water for each pound of steak.

• For every 10 pounds of healthy grain you put into a cow, you only get out one pound of meat.

• Worldwide, we chop down an acre of rainforest every minute, and lose millions of grasslands acres a year, to feed and graze cattle.

• Cows crap about 65 pounds a day -- that's 12 tons a year.

• Factory farm runoff has poisoned the ground water in 17 states and has polluted 35,000 miles of America's rivers.

• 16% of the greenhouse gas methane comes from animals.

• Monocroppers douse our fields with one billion pounds of toxic pesticides a year.

• Short-sighted practices make the earth lose 24 billion tons of topsoil a year.

• Agricultural runoff is the #1 pollutant of U.S. rivers, killing entire ecosystems and poisoning our groundwater. The EPA says we could save $15 billion worth of water treatment plants if we cut agricultural toxins.

• You need more and more chemicals all the time, to get the same results.

• Monocroppers get huge federal subsidies, no matter how much they produce —a total of $14 billion a year.

• In 2002, the largest 10 percent of farms collected 65 percent of the subsidies;the bottom half got 2 percent — a paltry 256 bucks a year.

• 7 percent of our farms sell 72 percent of our food.

• The average American meal travels 2000 miles from farm to table.

• 15 percent of American kids are overweight —triple the proportion in 1980.

• 30 percent of American adults are overweight.

• Rising cancer rates, especially in children and especially around heavy agricultural areas, show that those toxic pesticides aren't just killing bugs and soil; they're killing people.