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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Building a Healthy Food System in Rural America
  • Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:09:23 -0600


Building a Healthy Food System in Rural America
By David Goodman, "Foodtopia," July/August 2009
http://www.eatingwell.com/food_news_origins/seasonal_local/building_a_healthy_food_system_in_rural_america

How a handful of organic farmers, world-class cheesemakers and a locavore
restaurant transformed Hardwick, Vermont—a poor, rural town—into a foodie
mecca.

The future of food, I’ve been told, may be found in a hardscrabble town of
3,200 in northern Vermont. But as I walk down the main street of Hardwick, a
former granite-quarrying town, there is nothing that would indicate this is
the new food utopia heralded by The New York Times. I pass the Chinese
take-out joint, catch the charred whiff of a burned-out building and finally
stop catty-corner from the laundromat and police station. Then I spot it: a
cheery pumpkin-colored building with floor-to-ceiling windows and etched on
the glass: “Claire’s: Local ingredients. Open to the world.” I step through
the restaurant door, and I am immediately transported.

This locavore haven in an otherwise struggling outpost of rural America is
hopping. Young people in jeans hobnob comfortably alongside a clutch of
stylish older women and a few men in jackets and ties. A waitress struts
purposefully across the bright maple floor balancing a Moroccan vegetable
tagine that trails heady scents of cumin and garlic. My head snaps sideways
as an aromatic curried soup of sunchokes, carrots and pistachios is ferried
to an expectant patron.

Kristina Michelsen, tonight’s casually dressed maître d’ (and a co-owner),
motions for me to sit on a bench seat; my wife, Sue, takes a chair across the
square cherry table. Our server pours water into small Mason-jar glasses. The
place has the folksy feel of a diner, and it seems only natural to greet the
people around me. And so I do: the man in the suit at the next table drives a
snowplow and owns the gas station in town. Two tables down, an author
visiting from Boston is here with his girlfriend. At another table sits Linda
Ramsdell, owner of Hardwick’s Galaxy Bookshop and also a co-owner of the
restaurant.

Our waitress returns with a delicious appetizer of baked Hartwell cheese with
cranberry chutney and sprout slaw. The cheese has a soft texture like Brie,
and it melts in my mouth. Kristina explains that the cheese, made in small
batches by artisan cheesemakers at Ploughgate Creamery, a few minutes up the
road, is typical for Claire’s: much of Claire’s food is grown or produced
within 45 miles of the restaurant. In northeastern Vermont, where winter
lasts six months, that’s saying something. Underscoring her point, she
gestures to two young women who have just walked in, one in a soiled Carhartt
jacket. “There are your cheesemakers, Princess and Marisa, owners of
Ploughgate,” she says. “And over there is Pete Johnson, one of the farmers
who grew your salad,” she adds, pointing to a blond man several tables away.
“Here,” she says with a proud smile, “the celebrities are the farmers.”

Claire’s might be just another trendy restaurant—and in fact it made Conde
Nast Traveler’s 2009 “Hot List.” What sets it apart is its emphatically
untrendy location: a rural community 45 miles from the Canadian border where
the median household income is $42,000. Yet more than 100 local residents
banded together to buy 50 certificates, worth $1,000 each, in this
community-supported place (think CSA, the restaurant version) that opened in
the spring of 2008. Prices for this “new Vermont cuisine” are relatively
modest: appetizers average around $6 and entrees range from $9 for the
vegetable tagine to $24 for certain cuts of grass-fed steak from a farm two
miles away.

To fans of local food and sustainable agriculture, Claire’s and Hardwick are
the sun around which planets are aligning—the planets in this case being a
network of innovative food entrepreneurs and organic farmers who are working
together to build a new food infrastructure and breathe life into the
struggling economy. They want to save the town, and the world, through good
food. Community, in all its manifestations, is at once the clientele,
beneficiary and by-product of what Claire’s serves.

I didn’t initially come to Hardwick in search of a great restaurant. I came
to find a place that offered a glimmer of hope for farmers. I had just spent
several months chronicling the lives of the last three dairy farmers in my
community, Waterbury, Vermont, just an hour’s drive south. These farmers are
putting in 100-hour weeks but are barely staying afloat. Rosina Wallace, a
fifth-generation farmer, worries that she may be the last steward of her
family’s 143-year-old farm, now teetering on the brink. Third-generation
farmer Mark Davis has told me how he lost $15,000 in one recent winter when
the price of milk dropped below his costs of producing it. The precarious
viability of dairy farming helps explain why the number of dairy farmers in
Vermont alone has fallen 90 percent in the last six decades.

Yet 40 miles north of Waterbury, the story is very different. In 1998, the
year Jasper Hill Farm opened its cheesemaking operation just north of
Hardwick, five local dairy farms had gone under. Today, the local demand for
milk—from Jasper Hill, Cabot Creamery, Bonnieview and a half-dozen other
local cheesemakers—is helping dairy farms to prosper. Artisanal cheeses from
Jasper Hill and Cabot Creamery sell for upwards of $20 a pound and have been
named among the top 100 cheeses in the world. And the success story seems to
be the same with other local businesses: here in the northeast corner of
Vermont—one of the poorest rural regions in America—farmers, cheesemakers, a
tofu maker, a composting operation, Claire’s Restaurant and regular townsfolk
are all working together to revolutionize the way food is produced and
delivered.

Leading the revolution is the Center for an Agricultural Economy, which was
launched in 2004 by Andrew Meyer, a 38-year-old former staffer to retired
Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords. Meyer’s family owns a dairy farm in Hardwick
and when he returned from Washington, D.C., Meyer founded Vermont Soy, which
produces small-batch tofu, and Vermont Natural Coatings, which makes nontoxic
wood finishes derived from dairy whey. He conceived of the nonprofit Center
as a way for businesses to lead the charge in forging a locally based healthy
food system, in Hardwick and beyond.

If Meyer is the mild-mannered brains behind the movement, Tom Stearns,
president of the Center, is its evangelist. With his bushy red beard, wool
vest and muck boots, Stearns looks the part of the hippie farmers who began
quietly migrating into the poor, rural Northeast Kingdom of Vermont as part
of the back-to-the-land counterculture of the 1970s. But Stearns, the son of
classical musicians, is no laid-back flower child. He dreams big, and has a
track record of success. He fashioned his college hobby of growing and
selling organic seeds into a multimillion-dollar business that now employs 30
people.

In the cavernous warehouse of High Mowing Organic Seeds, four miles from
downtown Hardwick, Stearns holds forth like a hellfire preacher. He swears
that the solution to the woes of Hardwick, and the country, is healthy food,
in all its dimensions: “In a thriving food system, there is healthy food
available to all, so it’s not a class issue. Second, food is produced,
processed and distributed in ways that enhance rather than degrade the
environment. There must be appreciation for local food traditions. And food
must be fair—from the standpoint of those who are growing and processing the
food, all the way to those who are purchasing it.”

Stearns landed in the Northeast Kingdom in the mid-1990s in part because
there was already a community of farmers and a sustainable food ethic. The
Buffalo Mountain Co-op on Main Street in Hardwick, one of the oldest food
co-ops in the country, has more than 1,000 members (in a town of 3,200!).
“There’s been an amazing community here for a long time,” observes Annie
Gaillard, who has worked at the co-op for 24 years. “So the infrastructure
was here. These guys,” she says of Stearns and the Center, “are taking it to
the next level.”

The Center was born out of the sharing and collaboration that had been going
on informally among food-based businesses. For several years, Stearns had
been going out for beers with Andrew Meyer and Pete Johnson, the namesake of
Pete’s Greens, an organic farm in nearby Craftsbury. The three young,
idealistic and ambitious entrepreneurs began sharing ideas about how to run
their new businesses, and this quickly evolved into sharing employees,
equipment and even loaning each other money. The collaboration kept taking on
new dimensions, new participants and spawning new business ventures.

For example, High Mowing Organic Seeds was growing organic squash and
pumpkins to extract seeds, but it had no use for thousands of pounds of
pumpkin meat. So Johnson, who had just set up an industrial kitchen to offer
prepared food as part of his growing farm CSA, took a half-ton of free
pumpkin puree, got Cabot Creamery to provide butter, a local farmer to
provide eggs and a local baker to help out. Thus was born “Pies for the
People,” a project that donated hundreds of pies to the local food shelf last
fall and looks to become an annual event. Unused crops from the various
businesses get composted at the Highfields Institute in Hardwick, which
promotes community-based composting as a way of improving soils, and that
compost is then used to fertilize fields at High Mowing, Pete’s Greens and
other area farms.

Ultimately, it may be the cross-fertilization of ideas that has been one of
the most fruitful by-products of the collaborations. “The sheer number of
organic and sustainable farms in our area is higher per capita than anywhere
else in the U.S.,” says Stearns. “And all this is happening in a region that
has some of the highest unemployment in the state, the lowest incomes, where
over half the local students qualify for free school lunch. People are hungry
for opportunity. And the opportunity is in agriculture.”

The Center for an Agricultural Economy is now generating projects faster than
a summer garden produces zucchini. The Center recently acquired Atkins Field,
15 acres of land and a former granite shed in downtown Hardwick, which the
Center hopes to transform into an education and resource center, a year-round
farmers’ market, plots for new farmers and community garden plots for
townspeople, all within walking distance of the elementary school. In
addition, the Vermont Food Venture Center—an incubator for small food-based
businesses—will soon relocate its industrial kitchens to Hardwick. The
picture starts to come into focus: healthy food takes its place in the center
of the community, local farming is strengthened, the local economy is
revitalized and the seeds for future businesses are sown.

These ventures are beginning to yield results. Hardwick Town Manager Rob
Lewis estimates that the “hippies who became yuppies” and their businesses
have, so far, generated about 100 decent-paying jobs in town. “It’s an
exciting thing for us to be looking at opportunities for growth, rather than
stagnation,” Lewis told me as he sat in his cluttered Town Hall office,
noting with amusement that he has gotten calls from around North America
inquiring about “the Hardwick model.”

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has called Hardwick “an
important national test-case of the possibilities of relocalizing an economy,
a real-world, real-time exploration of the challenges.” Author and activist
Bill McKibben says, “Hardwick has all the pieces of a healthy food system
connected and ready to fall into place, and is as far ahead in sustainable
agriculture as any place in the country. Deep and transformative things are
happening here.”

Though there is little data to show whether this model can be replicated,
this past spring, researchers from MIT and Columbia University visited to see
how the Hardwick experiment was progressing and last year, the University of
Vermont signed on to provide technical support to the Center. Stearns and
Meyer hope to tap the university’s marketing and agricultural expertise and
get its help on issues such as childhood obesity and diabetes. Plans are also
moving forward to build an eco-industrial park where many of the food
businesses might co-locate so that they can more easily share resources. In
April, Honey Gardens Apiaries, a Vermont distiller, announced it was moving
its operation for making honey wine to Hardwick. Todd Hardie, founder of
Honey Gardens, compared Hardwick to “Amish communities where they build a
barn and everyone has a role in it and gathers around to give input and
support. We want to be part of that collaborative spirit.”

Local. Healthy. Community-based. Delicious. These themes are at the heart of
the Hardwick food community. I am reminded of that as I arrive at Jasper Hill
Farm’s gleaming new $2 million cheese cave in Greensboro, eight miles away.
The jaw-dropping 22,000-square-foot cave—said to be the finest of its kind in
North America—is the labor of love of brothers and farmers Andy and Mateo
Kehler. As I walk through the seven vaults, I crane my neck to look at tall
racks of aging cheeses that are stacked to the arched ceiling and turned by
hand each day. Jasper Hill’s own cheeses are here—they make a mouthwatering
slow-ripened soft cheese they call Constant Bliss, as well as Bayley Hazen
Blue, a spectacular natural-rinded blue cheese that landed the brothers on
the NBC Today show. Wine Spectator recently named two of Jasper Hill’s
cheeses among the top 100 cheeses in the world. Also making that list were
Cabot Creamery’s Clothbound Cheddar, Vermont Ayr and Grafton Clothbound,
which are all aged at Jasper Hill.

The Kehlers intend their cheese cellar to be a center for a budding artisanal
cheese industry that serves the whole region, providing opportunities for
local dairy farmers to become cheesemakers. For those new to cheesemaking,
Jasper Hill will provide technical expertise as well as cave space to get
them started. I mention to Andy Kehler the plight of the dairy farmers in my
community, noting how dairy farmer Rosina Wallace bemoaned how she must ship
her milk hundreds of miles away to be processed. Andy listened and replied,
“That’s exactly the kind of farmer we need. Have her call me.”

Just up the road in the rolling hills of Craftsbury, I find Pete Johnson of
Pete’s Greens and his girlfriend, Meg Gardner. They are inside one of four
movable greenhouses, hunched over trays of bright green sprouts, delicately
slicing shoots with a razor knife. Pete’s Greens is a four-season organic
farm that until six years ago provided food to fancy restaurants in Boston
and New York. But Pete, a raffishly handsome man with a shaggy crop of blond
hair and five-o’clock shadow, tells me he no longer wants to send his food
far away. In the past three years he has flipped from selling three-fourths
of his produce out of state to selling that same amount in state. Most of his
business now is his Good Eats CSA, which combines offerings from his farm
with those from a number of different farms and food producers. Good Eats has
about 250 local members. A 17-week share of vegetables and locally produced
goods, such as yogurt, milk, tofu, bread and fruit, costs $44 per week. Is
there interest? Good Eats makes up half the farm’s business, and Pete says
his farm and most other local producers can barely keep up with the demand
for local food.

“It’s gratifying to know and please the people who are eating our food,” he
says as he slices off a pinch of radish sprouts and hands them to me. “Try
it,” he urges. A spicy, zingy sensation lights up my tongue. Pete chuckles as
I pucker in pleasant surprise. His farm is renowned for its specialty and
heirloom vegetables, from numerous varieties of kale and fingerling potatoes
to dandelion greens and garlic scapes. Claire’s Restaurant chef and co-owner
Steven Obranovich is a regular customer.

Pete insists that thinking local is thinking big. “I think we are just at the
beginning of what I hope will be a revolution in how we feed ourselves,” he
tells me from among his sprout beds. “My vision is of a village- or
multi-village-based food system where most of what the people here eat is
from here, with some key local trading. I think it has the potential to be
really efficient, create a lot of good jobs and small businesses, and create
incredible community, which is something we’ve lost.”

How will Hardwick measure success? Andrew Meyer, who still looks the part of
a preppy Senate staffer, considers my question as we stand next to a vat of
soy curd that is being slowly and rhythmically stirred by a bearded young man
with a giant paddle. Meyer suddenly pipes up, saying, “Success will be
determined by the number of jobs we create in this area, the increased
awareness of where your food comes from, the amount of land that’s being
productively worked, and also the trail of your local dollar. The more times
that money can stay within the community, the more it supports the local food
system.”

It is a midweek night and Claire’s is packed. Some of it can be chalked up to
Chef Steven Obranovich’s “New Vermont Cooking”: “It’s what the farmers want
to grow and what I want to cook and what people want to eat,” the wiry,
bespectacled chef tells me.

But the Hardwick story is bigger than food. It’s about how a struggling town
has helped to launch a restaurant that has become a local gathering place.
It’s about how townsfolk showed up at the new restaurant last summer with
fresh-picked blueberries for Steven to put up, so that Claire’s—their
place—would have what it needed. It’s about community, vision and
perseverance, something this gritty town knows plenty about. The blueberry
upside-down cake I savor tonight is its sweet reward.

Jenifer Vaughan, a local salon owner, recently made a point of stopping by
Claire’s to thank them “for what they’re doing and what they’ve brought into
town. They’ve generated a buzz. It’s not just another cool restaurant.
There’s genuineness. There’s love there.”

Fixing the food system is a daunting task. And Hardwick, with its quirky
character and history, may or may not be a model that is readily exported.
There are numerous obstacles: the tanking economy, tensions within the
community between the new haves and the old have-nots. But the bold vision
and efforts of these farmers, thinkers and entrepreneurs has generated
momentum.

Tom Stearns is convinced that the farmers of Hardwick can change the world.
“People can be inspired by what they see here. Then they do things like this
in their own community, and it could crescendo,” he flings his arms wide,
“into a wave of food-system change around the country.”

With that, another dinner at Claire’s is served, a celebration of great
possibility renewed with each course.













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