Might it not be that eating and farming are inseparable concepts that belong together on the farm, not two distinct economic activities as we have now made them in the United States?” —Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land
We learn as children that there is no free lunch. That a farmer’s work is never done. Waste not, want not. But for a chef and his cooks in the middle of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, this can be far from evident. We see dirt all right, but it isn’t soil. And while we may shake the dirty hand of a farmer at the Greenmarket a few times a week, we never get our own hands very dirty. We work stunningly long hours, pound, slap, and flip food, and then unload it onto thousands of plates, but we live on the far side of a broken connection. We can’t see the tomato beyond the salad, the farmer beyond the tomato, or, for that matter, the farm beyond the farmer.
And so, several times a season—between the end of May and mid-September—the cooks and I make a pilgrimage to Blue Hill, my grandmother’s old farm in the Berkshire mountains, to plant and harvest vegetables for the restaurant. The routine: Leave after dinner service, arrive by 2 a.m., enjoy a meal together, nap, break ground by dawn, and head back to the restaurant by late afternoon.
“Ordering: two hamachi, three skate, a bass, and a halibut à la carte. Ordering: one crab salad—make that two—two crab salads, two sardines, and a finnan haddie on the fly.” Cooks lunge and leap, bend and feint, whirling to avoid collision. It’s an especially busy Sunday evening, but the feast I’m preparing has nothing to do with the packed dining room. Blue hills, shimmering in the distance under a gentle sun, couldn’t seem farther from this cramped basement kitchen, but before midnight we’ll be loaded into the vans and on our way.
By 2 a.m., we’re a half dozen nationalities around a candlelit table, looking like a United Nations assembly happily at peace. There are small satisfactions in this business of cooking—a perfectly roasted piece of sea bass, a soufflé that rises as if by prayer—but there are few pleasures. Among them is sharing food around a table of cooks. Every night we provide the conditions for other people’s pleasure. But tonight it’s our turn. Snir, the meat cook (and former army lieutenant), raises his wine in a toast. “Tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen, we have some land to conquer.” We clink our glasses, laugh, and dig in.
by 7 a.m., we’ve formed a line at the garden gate, like excited kids on the first day of camp. Mike Kokas, the owner of Upstate Farms, in the heart of the Hudson Valley, arrives as he does every year, by sunrise. He bears seedlings, tools, and buckets of compost magically transformed from the restaurant’s kitchen scraps. If fertility has a scent, surely this is it.
Unlike Snir, Mike doesn’t talk about our task in military terms. “There are no pests, no enemies—no such thing, really. Just signs that there’s an imbalance and nature’s way of correcting it.” In place of Miracle-Gro, Mike has brought compost; in place of harsh chemicals, he tells me to find some hay bales and “cover any unplanted areas between the rows”—suppressing weed growth before it begins. Using only shovels, we turn the soil by hand—a necessary hardship to ensure that oxygen reaches the roots.
Next comes a hands-on demonstration of weed pulling. We huddle around. “Pull from the roots,” says Mike. “Attack deep and get at its heart.” One part artist, one part scientist, our farmer is open to happy accidents. He gives a group of us a handful of fava bean seeds. “Try these at the north end of the plot,” he says, then leaves us on our own. In the north plot we plant a row of the seeds, only to discover later that Mike had meant the entire north plot. We had crammed five rows of beans into just one, on top of each other, with what Manuel, our vegetable cook, observes is “like no elbow room for our friends.” Our mentor scratches his head at the sight, like a man who has forgotten where he parked his car. Then he advises us to experiment with the result, which he predicts will be a row of congested, but delicious, fava bean leaves.
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