Taste, Memory: Forgotten Foods, Lost Flavors, and Why They Matter by David Buchanan

Author:David Buchanan [Buchanan, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2012-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

Seven

SMALL FARMS IN THE CITY, THE COUNTRY, AND EVERYWHERE IN BETWEEN

“Didn’t think you’d make it,” my friend Jeremy Oldfield says as I come rushing through the New Haven, Connecticut, train station. He’s standing near the platform with an overnight bag, scanning the crowd. “Already got our tickets, though,” he tells me. We walk through the station to the nearest car and find seats a couple of minutes before the train pulls out. Still sweating and breathing hard after running half a mile in August heat from the nearest parking lot, I take a moment to decompress before settling in for the hour-and-a-half trip to New York’s Penn Station.

Jeremy and his girlfriend, Emily, worked as apprentices two years ago in the summer of 2007 for Eliot Coleman (Maine vegetable farmer, organic agriculture guru, and author of The New Organic Grower). Now they live in Berkeley, California, where they’ve started a business designing and building residential vegetable gardens. He and Emily are back on the East Coast for a brief visit. She’s looking into graduate work at Yale’s School of Forestry, and he wants to catch up with friends. We’re headed to New York to meet up with Cerise Mayo, a mutual friend I know through Slow Food. Cerise apprenticed at Coleman’s Four Season Farm with Jeremy and Emily, then returned to Park Slope, Brooklyn, the following winter. There she’s tending bees and working with a variety of food and agriculture groups. It’s hard to imagine a better guide for the Brooklyn food scene than Cerise.

Many of Jeremy’s peers live very different lives in New York. He’s a recent graduate of elite Williams College in northwestern Massachusetts, and his girlfriend Emily went to Yale. Both grew up in cities and weren’t raised to be farmers, not by a long shot. This is a lifestyle choice for them. Jeremy has the close-cropped beard and longish hair of a new farming generation, but he’s too open and engaging, too California-friendly and warm, to fit in exactly with the hipster Brooklyn crowd. He favors Carhartt pants and T-shirts over skinny jeans and a fedora.

“Tell me about Chez Panisse,” I ask him. Building gardens by day, he’s been waiting tables at Alice Waters’s famed Berkeley restaurant by night. “It’s amazing,” he says, to be in the center of such a vibrant food world. How did he wind up with a shift there? Isn’t it all but impossible to get in the door? “Working with Eliot helped,” he tells me. You couldn’t ask for stronger farming credentials than Coleman’s, and this matters at Chez Panisse, the restaurant that launched America’s love affair with local food. It also doesn’t hurt that Jeremy and Emily are a photogenic couple. I often stumble across shots of him in unexpected places, like gardening websites and the glossy pages of seed catalogs, digging carrots and demonstrating farming techniques.

As much as I’m anxious to see Cerise and visit with Jeremy, my primary reason for traveling to Brooklyn during the height of the growing season is to check out some pioneering urban agriculture projects.

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