[Editor’s Note: I worked briefly at The Cleaver Company as an extern. My time there was cut short (pun alert!) when I snipped off the tip of my finger while chopping candied ginger for a dessert. Unfortunately I didn’t return, except as a customer at the neighboring Green Table.
These excerpts are from a talk that Cleaver gave as the first recipient of Slow Food NYC’s Snail Blazer Award at the organization’s annual gala.]
“As a chef and businessperson I practice seriously and embrace the ability and responsibility we have — the difference we can make — by consciously directing our food dollars.
I was fortunate to be raised on good food. I grew up cooking for pleasure and as a way of contributing to the family. We had large gatherings every summer on the shores of Buzzard’s Bay in southeastern Massachusetts, and feasted on corn picked just before dawn, clams dug from the sands of the tidal ponds, mussels harvested from the rocks by the creek, and seafood just off the boats of the then-formidable New Bedford fleets. I discovered that I enjoyed cooking for a crowd: I loved the camaraderie and cacophony of a well-fed group around a big table. I found that good food was appreciated and valuable; that it fed good spirits. That it was nurturing.
When I finished college in southern Vermont I wanted to buy a farm, raise goats and make goat cheese, but my intelligent partner of these past 35 years, Ashley Hollister, pointed out that I did not have the funds or skills to do that — so instead we moved to the marketplace of New York City to find jobs. I started out washing dishes in a fancy food shop, and it wasn’t long before I discovered I could make a living by cooking for people gathered around a big table.
Didn’t know there was a war on in the United States? Well there is a battle for good, locally produced food.
Have you read about Victory Gardens? The World War generations experienced something amazing that has conveniently been erased from our country’s collective memory: When called upon during times of conflict, Americans stood up and did their patriotic duty by cultivating a garden.
Millions of pounds of fresh food and produce were raised during the war years—as much as 40% of all vegetables consumed nationally.
5,285,000 Victory Gardens in the United States
According to The War Garden Victorious, Indianapolis “estimated the value of its war-garden crop in 1918 at $1,473,165. Denver placed its yield at $2,500,000 and Los Angeles at $1,000,000. Washington, District of Columbia reached $1,396,5000.”
Thanks to propaganda (“your garden is a munitions plant”) there were 5,285,000 victory gardens in 1918. The City of Rochester, New York alone had more than 15,000. The “estimated value of our war-garden crops for 1918 (was) $525,000,000! A half billion dollars!”
Before you get visions of Mike Meyers as Dr Evil, let’s quickly translate that figure into 2010 dollars. A half billion dollars in 1918 would be worth $7,875,000,000 today. And that’s not small potatoes.
Sustainability. Everyone is talking about it but what does it really mean? Some people think it means organic. Others see images of small family farms run by fresh-faced college grads.
The textbook answer focuses on conservation and preservation. “What is taken out of the environment is put back in, so land and resources such as water, soil and air can be replenished and are available to future generations.”
That’s definition is inline with what farm-to-table chef and owner, Peter Hoffman of New York’s Savoy and Back Forty restaurants, would agree with.
But what if you have 32,000 restaurants serving 64 million customers in 117 countries each day? Then your definition of sustainability is a bit different.
On the Fourth of July, to protest continuously low milk prices, dairy farmers in 15 states dumped thousands of gallons milk rather than sell for less than the cost of production.
Dairy farmers are nearly two years into a crisis that, at its worst, had them earning $9 per hundredweight of milk.
To put this in perspective, the average milk production cost—the break-even price—is between $17 and $27 per hundredweight, depending on the region of the country.
So, every time the milk truck comes for a pickup, farmers are not just giving their milk away, they’re losing money.
Dairy is an incredibly difficult topic to understand; so much so, that even agricultural policy experts have trouble with it.
But one thing that should be known is that this crisis is not the fault of dairy farmers. Family farmers enduring this crisis are not naive businesspeople. They are actually some of the most innovative and efficient producers in the country. Nor is this crisis simply the result of over-supply and decreased demand, as those who are benefiting would have us believe.
In fact, people in the U.S. consume more dairy products than our farmers can produce; the U.S. is generally a net importer of dairy products. The truth is that a combination of factors has led to this situation: a nosedive in milk prices, skyrocketing production costs, a tightening credit market, unregulated imports of milk substitutes, a broken pricing system that is vulnerable to extreme volatility and price manipulation, decades of lax antitrust enforcement, and increased consolidation in the industry.
When European settlers arrived more than 350 years ago, it was said that the Eastern forests were so expansive that a squirrel could travel from the Chesapeake Bay to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground.
Most of the broad, open views that we associate today with a drive in the country are essentially manmade. The fields we pass were likely farms that went fallow as farmers sold out or left to farm in the Midwest and California after WWII.
East Coast farms face multiple threats: cheap imports, competition from huge farms, an aging farm population that often earns the minimum wage, the relentless pressure of development and a lack of infrastructure to bring products to market.
Protect Land by Farming It
If you want to preserve “viewscapes” you can do what Chef Dan Barber’s grandmother did in Great Barrington, MA: Farm your open land, or lease it to someone else to farm. Keep it in sustainable and responsible production.
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