From before the first frost until after the salad greens had finally poked their heads above the warming soil, most of my food for seven months came from within a couple dozen miles of my house. For a few things, I traveled to the corners of this watershed, which covers the northwest third of Vermont and a narrower fringe along the New York shore of Lake Champlain. (I did make what might be called the Marco Polo exception—I considered fair game anything your average 13th-century explorer might have brought back from distant lands. So pepper and turmeric, and even the odd knob of ginger, stayed in the larder.) Eating like this is precisely how almost every human being ate until very recently, and how most people in the world still do eat today. But in contemporary America, where the average bite of food travels 1,500 miles before it reaches your lips, it was an odd exercise. Local and seasonal may have become watchwords of much new cooking, but I wanted to see what was really possible, especially in these northern climes. I know that eating close to home represents the history of American farming—but I sense it may have a future, too. The number of farms around Burlington, Vermont’s chief city, has grown 19 percent in the past decade. Most of them are small, growing food for local consumers instead of commodities for export; the same trend is starting to show up nationwide. Something’s happening, and I wanted to see exactly what.
I’m writing this, so you know I survived. But, in fact, I survived in style—it was the best eating winter of my life. Here’s my report:
September
The farmers market in Middlebury, Vermont, is in absolute fever bloom: sweet, sweet corn; big, ripe tomatoes; bunches of basil; melons. This is the bounty of our short but intense summer, when the heat of the long days combines with the moisture of these eastern uplands to produce almost anything you could want. It’s the great eating moment of the year.
But I’m wandering the market trying to keep the image of midwinter in mind—the short, bitter days of January, when the snow is drifted high against the house and the woodstove is cranking. I’m used to getting the winter’s wood in, but not to putting the winter’s food by. In our world, it’s always summer somewhere, and so we count on the same produce year-round. But that takes its toll: on the environment, from endless trucking and flying and shipping; on local farmers, who can’t compete with the equatorial bounty and hence sell their fields for condos; and most of all, perhaps, on taste. There’s nothing that tastes like a June strawberry; whereas a January supermarket strawberry tastes like … nothing.
All of which explains why I’m bargaining for canning tomatoes, the Romas with perhaps a few blemishes. Though mostly I want to spend the winter buying what’s available, I’ll put up a certain amount. My friend Amy Trubek volunteers to help—a food anthropologist, she’s the head of the Vermont Fresh Network, which partners farmers with chefs; she and her husband, Brad Koehler, one of the chefs at (and general manager of) Middlebury College’s renowned dining halls, also own a small orchard and a big vegetable garden, not to mention a capacious freezer. “A lot of people associate canning with their grandmother, hostage in the kitchen for six weeks,” she says. “But, hey, this is the twenty-first century. We can freeze, we can cure, we can Cryovac—we can do all this a hundred different ways.” An afternoon’s work, with the Red Sox beginning their stretch drive on the radio, and I’ve got enough tomato sauce frozen in Ziplocs to last me through the winter.
October
Fall lingers on (and the Red Sox, too). I’m already regarding the leaf lettuce in our local food co-op with a kind of nostalgia, knowing it’s about to disappear from my life. And I’m regarding two small bins in the co-op’s bulk section as my lifeline. They’re filled with local flour, 59 cents a pound. Once upon a time, the Champlain Valley was the nation’s granary—but that was back before the Erie Canal opened the way west and vast rivers of grain began rolling back from the deep topsoil of the Plains. Grain farming all but disappeared from the region; the most basic component of the American diet had to be imported from Nebraska.
But there’s always an oddball, and, in this case, his name is Ben Gleason, who came to Vermont, as did many others, as a part of the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s. He found an old farm in the Addison County town of Bridport and began to plant it in a rotation of organic hard red winter wheat. Last year, for instance, he grew 30 tons on 28 acres, perfectly respectable even by Midwest standards, and he ground all of it with the small, noisy machine in the shed next to his house. He only does whole-wheat flour—white would require another machine, and anyway, as he points out, it’s not nearly as good for you. In any event, his is delicious—making pancakes flavorful enough to stand up to the Grade B maple syrup that’s the only kind we buy. (Grade A, Fancy—it’s for tourists. The closer to tar, the better.)
“There’s maybe four or five hundred acres altogether that’s planted in wheat around the area,” says Samuel Sherman, who owns Champlain Valley Milling, in Westport, New York. Mostly he grinds wheat that arrives by train car from the west, but he’d love to see more local product. “We can sell it in a minute,” he says. The proof is just down the lakeshore, in the town of Crown Point, where a young baker named Yannig Tanguy makes artisanal bread—fougasse, baguette, Swabian rye—entirely with local wheat that he grinds himself, sometimes 300 pounds in a day. Crown Point is a poor town next to an aging paper mill—and yet the door to the little bakery keeps popping open constantly. Here’s someone who wants to reserve ten loaves for an elementary school dinner the next week; here’s a woman to buy a cookie and say thanks for letting her park in the tiny lot during church that morning. “It’s not like I’m trying to invent anything with local food,” says Tanguy. “It all obviously worked for a long time. That we’re here today is proof that it worked. And it can work again.”
November
The traditional Thanksgiving dinner is also the traditional local foods dinner in this part of the world. Which makes sense, since the Pilgrims weren’t in any position to import much food—they just hunkered down with the beige cuisine that begins to predominate as the summer becomes mere memory. (On Cape Cod, cranberries provide a flash of deep color; here, we have beets, which make a ruby slaw.) The kind of self-sufficient all-around farm with which the colonists covered the continent has essentially disappeared, at least outside of Amish country. Even the tiny growers in this valley specialize in order to stay afloat—I can show you a potato farmer in the hills above Rutland with 50 varieties on his three acres, or a bison wrangler on the lakeshore, or an emu rancher. Some of America’s original community-supported agriculture farms (CSAs) are in this area, and none produce vegetables more glorious than those from Golden Russet Farm, in Shoreham, where Will and Judy Stevens are busy threshing dried beans when I stop by one afternoon to pick up some squash. If you pay them a few hundred dollars in the winter, they’ll keep you supplied with a weekly bin of vegetables throughout the growing season and deep into the fall. But even Will and Judy go to the store for their milk.
Not so Mark and Kristin Kimball, the young proprietors of Essex Farm, on the New York side of the lake. If you want to join their CSA, you pay more like a few thousand dollars. But when you stop by on Friday afternoons for your pickup, it’s not just vegetables: They have a few milking cows, so there’s milk and cheese and butter; they have a small herd of grass-fed cattle, so there are steaks and burgers; the snorting tribe of pigs behind the barn provides bacon and lard; there are chickens and turkeys. Except for paper towels and dental floss, you’d never have to set foot in a store again—think Laura Ingalls Wilder, complete with a team of big Belgians. “There’s nothing inherent about modern ways that I don’t support,” Mark insists. “It just so happens that working with horses is—not better than working with tractors, but more fun. It’s a more dynamic relationship. You can understand an engine. You’ll never understand a horse.”
You can’t leave the farm without Mark loading your trunk full of food—“Do you have room for another chicken in there?”—and all of it tastes of the place. As you bump down the driveway, a look in the rearview mirror reveals Mark juggling carrots and grinning. “Occasionally I feel like I’m doing some work,” he says. “But usually it feels more like entertainment for myself.”
Is this realistic? Could you feed Manhattan in this fashion? You could not—every place is different. (And Manhattan is lucky to have New Jersey right next door, with some of the best truck-farming soil and weather anywhere on earth.) But you could feed Essex, New York, this way—Mark figures the 50 acres they’re farming can support ten families, a reminder of just how fertile the earth is in the right hands.
December
Here’s what I’m missing: not grapefruit, not chocolate. Oats. And their absence helps illustrate what’s happened to American agriculture, and what would be required to change it a little bit.
Once upon a time, oats were everywhere—people grew them for their horses, and for themselves. But oats aren’t easy to deal with. They have a hull that needs removing, and they need to be steamed, and dried, and rolled. You can do that more efficiently on an enormous scale in places like Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where a single mill can turn out more than half a million pounds of oat products a day. For the moment, this centralization works. But that may change if the price of oil (the lifeblood of industrial agriculture) continues to climb, or as the climate continues to shift, or if global politics deteriorates. Even now, stubborn people keep trying to rebuild smaller-scale food networks, but it’s hard going against the tide of cheap goods flowing in. A few years ago, for instance, a Vermonter named Andrew Leinoff decided to go into oats—he and his friend Eric Allen found some old equipment and started experimenting. But after a few years of struggling, they gave up, and a little bitterly. The state’s Agency of Agriculture talks a good game—a public service ad on the radio urges Vermonters to buy 10 percent of their food from within the state—but in the opinion of many small farmers, it spends most of its time and money propping up the state’s slowly withering dairy industry, not supporting the pioneers trying to build what comes next.
They sold their equipment across the border in Quebec, to an organic miller named Michel Gaudreau, who does everything from hulling spelt to pearling barley. And Gaudreau found a farmer in the province’s Eastern Townships, Alex Brand, whose family had been growing oats for many years. I tracked him down, delighted to find that Brand’s Fellgarth Farm was right on the edge of my Champlain watershed. But shipping a bag of oats across the border was going to be hard work—it might, they warned, require a trip to Customs. Happily, Brand had an American distributor—Joe Angello, in New York’s Columbia County. By the time all was said and done, my “local” oats had traveled on a truck from Canada to the lower Hudson Valley, and then back to Vermont in a UPS sack. Not precisely an ecological triumph. On the other hand, they were delicious—plump, if oats can be plump. So now it’s pancakes only every other morning.
January
Truth be told, my 11-year-old daughter has used the words icky and disgusting on several occasions, always in connection with root vegetables. Not potatoes, not carrots—but turnips, and parsnips, and rutabagas. It is a little hard to imagine how people got through winter on the contents of their root cellars alone.
Which is why I’m glad for the Ziplocs full of raspberries and blueberries my wife froze in the summer. And why I’m glad for the high-tech apple warehouse just down the road in Shoreham. Here’s the thing about apples: The best ones rot pretty fast. Sure, those brick-hard Red Delicious and Granny Smiths can be picked in New Zealand or South Africa or China or Washington and flown and trucked halfway around the world and sit on a shelf at the supermarket for a week and still look like an apple. (Taste is another story—they’ve been bred for immortality, and immortality alone.) But the great apples of the Northeast—your Cortland, your Empire, your Northern Spy, and, above all, your McIntosh—are softer, more ephemeral. For generations, people solved that problem by converting them to cider—hard cider, fermented for freezerless storage. That’s what most of those apple trees around New England were planted for. But there’s another solution if, like Barney Hodges, you have a storage shed where you can pump in nitrogen. “We push the oxygen level down from its normal twenty percent to just under three percent. The apple’s respiration is slowed to the point where the ripening process is nearly halted,” he explains. Every few weeks he cracks open another room in the warehouse, and it’s as if you’re back in September—the apples in his Sunrise Orchard bags head out to nearby supermarkets, where he frets that they won’t be kept cool.
Apples help illustrate another point, too: In the years ahead, local may be a more important word than organic in figuring out how to eat. In fact, a British study published this winter found that buying food from close to home prevented twice as much environmental damage as buying organic food from a distance.
Now, the best solution might be local and organic; most of the food I’ve been eating this winter falls into that category. But apples aren’t easy—an orchard is a monoculture, prey to a bewildering variety of insects and blights. And very few consumers, even at the natural foods co-op, will pick up a Macoun or a Paula Red if it’s clear that some other creature has taken the first nibble, so almost all the area growers do a little spraying. “How little spray can I get away with, and still produce fruit that people will buy?” asks Bill Suhr, who runs Champlain Orchards, down the road just above the Ticonderoga ferry dock. His saving grace is the cider press that’s clanking away as we talk: He can take the risk of using fewer chemicals because if the apples aren’t perfect, he can always turn them into cider. Absolutely delicious cider, too—I’ve been drinking well north of two gallons a week, and I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to orange juice. And each batch, because it draws on a slightly different mix of varieties, tastes a little different: tartest in early fall, sweetest and most complex at the height of the harvest, but always tangy and deep. It may not be organic, but it’s neighborly, which is good enough for me.
February
By now an agreeable routine has set in: pancakes or oatmeal or eggs in the morning, soup and a cheese sandwich for lunch. (I could eat a different Vermont cheese every day of the winter, but I usually opt for a hunk off the Orb Weaver farmstead round.) And for dinner, some creature that until quite recently was clucking, mooing, baaing, or otherwise signaling its pleasure at the local grass and hay it was turning into protein. Also potatoes. And something from the freezer—it’s a chest-type, and in a dark corner, so you basically just stick a hand in and see what vegetable comes out.
And, oh, did I mention beer? Otter Creek Brewing, a quarter mile down the road from my daughter’s school, makes a stellar wit bier, a Belgian style that is naturally cloudy with raw organic wheat from Ben Gleason’s farm. It’s normally sold in the summer, but I hoarded some for my winter drinking. “We’d love to use local barley for the rest of our beers,” says Morgan Wolaver, the brewery’s owner. But that would mean someone building a malting plant to serve not just Otter Creek but the state’s seven other microbreweries. Perhaps right next to the oat mill …
March
I can see spring in the distance—there are still feet of snow in the woods, but the sun is September strong, and it won’t be long before down in the valley someone is planting lettuce.
But there’s one last place I must describe, both because it’s provided many of my calories and because it embodies the idea of a small-scale farmer making a decent living growing great food. Jack and Anne Lazor bought Butterworks Farm, in the state’s Northeast Kingdom, in the mid-’70s, after a stint of working at Old Sturbridge Village, in Massachusetts: Dressed in 19th-century costumes, they milked cows by hand and talked to the tourists. As it turns out, they weren’t actors—they were real farmers. Slowly they’ve grown their business into one of the state’s premier organic dairies: Their yogurt is nearly a million-dollar business. I’ve been living off their dried beans, too, and their cornmeal. It’s great fun, then, to sit in their kitchen eating bacon and eggs and watch Anne mix up some salve for the teats of her cows, and listen to them describe their life. The talk’s a mix of technical detail (they milk Jerseys, not the more common Holsteins, which means less milk but higher protein, so their yogurt needs no pectin to stay firm) and rural philosophy. “We have such a ‘take’ mentality,” Jack is saying. “It’s part of our psyche, because we came to this verdant land as Europeans and were able to exploit it for so long.”
But here the exploitation feels more like collaboration. We stroll over to his solar barn, where the 100 cows in the herd loiter patiently, mulling over the events of the day. “That’s Morel, that’s Phooey, that’s Vetch, that’s Clover, that’s Jewel &” It’s very calm in here, no sound but cud being chewed, and it’s warm out of the late winter wind. Jack, who’s a talker, is explaining how Vermont could market itself as the Sustainable State, and how he’s hoping to sell masa harina for making tortillas next year, and so forth. I’m sort of listening, but mostly just absorbing the sheer pleasure of the scene—that this place works, that I’ve been connected to it all winter long, that it will be here, with any luck, for the rest of my life.
Look—eating this way has come at a cost. Not in health or in money (if anything, I’ve spent less than I usually would, since I haven’t bought a speck of processed food), but in time. I’ve had to think about every meal, instead of cruising through the world on autopilot, ingesting random calories. I’ve had to pay attention. But the payoff for that cost has been immense, a web of connections I’d never have known about otherwise. Sure, I’m looking forward to the occasional banana, the odd pint of Guinness stout. But I think this winter has permanently altered the way I eat. In more ways than one, it’s left a good taste in my mouth.