[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.

An Urban Forager is Born

So there I was in the great marketplace of New York City – but where was the local, seasonal food? At my first job in the fancy food shop, raspberries from Chile arrived in February and we sold them for $7.00 a pint, but it was nearly impossible to find local tomatoes in August at any price.

A wonderful thing happened when Bob Lewis and Barry Benepe opened the Greenmarkets at Union Square in 1976. I was there every day it was open, and still frequent it and others around the city in my daily routine. I knew that the taste of my food was dependent on the quality of the raw ingredients, and it became imperative to know where it came from and how it was raised. I was then, and still am, what is now called an “urban forager.”

In my search for the best ingredients, I learned more and more about just how unhealthy our food supply was. The questions started coming: Where did this food come from? How was this food produced? What is it that what I am eating has been eating? What is irradiation and why are we not treating the source of these bacterial problems rather than the symptoms? Where does the Cesium 137 go? Why is it less expensive for me to buy lamb from New Zealand than from Washington County?

What kind of earth will my children inherit – will there be one?

Slow Food NYC Connects Kids to Gardens and Food

The work that Slow Food NYC is doing in their Urban Harvest Programs directly addresses many of these concerns. We have a tremendous amount of educating to do to address the food illiteracy now rampant – and for no good reason – in our over privileged, capitalist society. The gardens that have been built and the children in the eleven schools – elementary through high school – that are benefiting from this work are learning what healthy food tastes like by learning to grow it, harvest it and cook it. These kids are being given a chance through the curriculum in the program and their experiences in the garden to choose life giving food rather than the poison so often passed off as food in our society. The work that Sandra McLean and the all-volunteer board and members of Slow Food NYC are doing through Urban Harvest in Schools and Urban Harvest Gardens is outstanding and vital. They are working hands-on with the kids in reclaiming vacant land, filling it with live soil, building gardens, harvesting, and cooking what they have grown. The kids eat delicious food, which they have not only foraged but have created, around a big table.

There is a strong and growing Good Food Movement and I thank each and every one of you who is part of it. I do believe that we all – every individual who eats – can and must take an active role in curing the food supply. We must view ourselves not as passive consumers but as active creators of a healthy food system. ’Food is not the problem, but rather the solution’ as Brian Lehrer of Edible New York said, to a myriad health and environmental problems we are facing.

Let’s use our hearts, our hands and our dollars conscientiously to create better food for all.”

Resources

Slow Food New York

When he and partner Andrew Tarlow restored a 1927 Brooklyn diner the dilapidated ambience, talented kitchen under chef Caroline Fidanza and lively everyone’s-a-friend ambiance created an instant hit that in many ways inspired the Brooklyn food movement.

A big driver for Diner’s success was Fidanza and her  Greenmarket sourcing. When farmers started delivering direct to Diner, Fidanza said “I could never go back to working with other ingredients. It just wouldn’t be worth it.”

Now each week Firth travels three hours from a Berkshire farm down a long dirt road in Monteray, Massachusetts to Williamburg, Brooklyn. In the process he swaps a T-shirt and rubber boots for a suit and martini glass. With incredible style and charm he manages to pull it off.

A Crowd-Pleasing Recipe

Diner’s Brick Chicken

But what happens when you pick up a menu and all the words are new—utterly exotic—to you? That’s the experience at Blue Hill at Stone Barns and it’s wonderful.

Think of venturing into a new world without a map. Terrifying for some, perhaps, but a thrill for others, especially when your guide is chef Dan Barber.

Here is a sample—of ingredients, and of the ways that Barber has chosen to group them.

greenhouse:  focea lettuce, ching chang bok choy, ruby chard, wild arugula, red deer tongue, green swiss chard, watercress, mokum carrots, bay leaves, rosemary, oscarde, golden frills, blackhawk, kohrabi, red Russian kale, dwarf pak choy, sulu,  Annapolis lettuce, firecracker, Italian parsley, Bordeaux spinach, Tuscan black kale, Tokyo bekana, mizuna, tango, truckee, troutback, purple garnet, bok choi, claytonia, mache, galisse, starbor kale, ruby streaks, purple komatsuma, sage, bright lights chard, minutina, garnet giant, magenta lettuce

pasture:  finn Dorset lamb, African goose, honey, Berkshire pork, eggs from our hens

field:  green garlic, golden beets, stinging nettles, merlin beets, mokum carrots, rutabaga, purple kale, day lily shoots, eight row flint corn, Bloomsdale spinach, parsnips, Forono beets, Tuscan kale, Orion kale, Tropea onion, Samantha cabbage, celery root, rose geranium

ocean:  Maine oysters, Long Island porgy, Bouchot mussels, wild Alaskan king salmon, bluefish, squid ink, black drum,  Woodbury clams, dulse seaweed, Quahog clams, razor clams, hake

river/lake:  sturgeon caviar

preserved:  panther soybeans, arcuri garlic, fennel, shelling beans, crosnes, kobacha squash, raspberries,
green tomatoes

Hudson valley:  white button mushrooms, ramps, wild onions, green onions, dandelion, upland cress, watercress, nasturtiums, pastured beef, La Belle Rouge chicken, rainbow chard, chiogga beets, tat soi, salsify, savoy cabbage, sunchokes, spring onions, horse radish, titan parsley, bartlett pears, granny smith apples, purple Peruvian potatoes, seckel pears, broccoli, maple syrup, nelson carrots, mutsu apples, Frederick wheat, emmer wheat

beyond:  porcini mushrooms, black trumpet mushrooms, hazelnuts, Meyer lemons, blood oranges, figs, pineapples, pink grapefruit, Mandarin oranges, pomelo

More Reading

Learning to Love Stinging Nettles

Nothing Quite as Beautiful as the Wild Ramp

Dandelion Wine: “Summer Caught and Stoppered”

I am looking for one in particular — the dandelion.  The French named this flower dens leonis, or “lion’s tooth” referring to the jagged points on the leaves. You know the yellow flower or the puff ball after the flower goes to seed.  But dandelions offer more than momentary entertainment or irritation.

Weed ‘Em and Eat

In France people grow dandelions to eat, just as we might grow lettuce. It’s best to collect dandelion leaves in early spring and then harvest again in late fall. As Wildman Steve Brill tells us:

“Dandelion greens are wonderful in salads, sauteed or steamed. They taste like chicory and endive, with an intense heartiness overlying a bitter tinge. People today shun bitter flavors; they’re so conditioned by overly sweet or salty processed food. But in earlier times, we distinguished between good and bad bitterness. Mixed with other flavors, as in a salad, dandelions improve the flavor.”

Some good news, too, for locavores and for nervous parents. There are no poisonous look-alikes for dandelions.

And it’s a rare weed indeed that  has a book named after it:  Dandelion Wine is Ray Bradbury’s recreation of a boy’s childhood, combining moments from his life and his imagination.

“Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered.”

I tried dandelion wine for the first time at Moon on the Pond Farm, where farmer Dominic Palumbo had just steeped a pot of dandelion flowers and was adding orange and lemons to a huge crock.

Dominic Stirs Summer with a Spoon

Then he poured a glass from a bottle of dandelion wine that had been produced last summer.

The wine was light—Prosecco light— and captivating. I wanted more. I could imagine serving it to friends with fish. Or a summer salad with watermelon. Sipping it by a lazy stream as the sun disappears into a warm, steamy night. More.

It’s time to make my own. So I am heading out late Sunday morning to pick a bag of dandelion flowers and try my hand at bottling summer.

Further Reading and Recipes

Jack Keller: More Than 42 Dandelion Wine Recipes

Such Good Taste

Summer is almost on us. If you’re old enough to remember a time when summer meant something in relation to the food we eat, then this is happy time.

Summer was the season when we could get almost any fruit or vegetable we desired.  Food was fresh and it was something special. Now, we can get everything all the time, regardless of season. Our kids take it for granted. But something besides taste is lost with this total 24/7/365 access food. Produce comes in from all over the world. If nothing else, it feels different that we can no longer associate certain foods with their harvest season.

We can only skip traditional seasons because varieties have been developed for their shipping characteristics rather than their eating quality. Older varieties, which may have had shorter spans of maturity, were too soft for long-distance shipping; those different shapes and sizes have been replaced by varieties specifically bred to be firm and uniform for efficient packing.

These new fruits and vegetables are usually picked before they are fully ripened (for longer shelf life), so they never develop the natural sugars that fully mature produce possesses. Local farmers, with shorter time to market, plant varieties that taste great and possess natural sweetness. They pick the produce when it is ripe and not green. Fresh, local foods do taste better.

Your Local Economy

No one needs to be reminded about the economy. Local produce may sometimes be a little more expensive than what you can get in the grocery stores. It seems ironic that something shipped in from a long distance is cheaper, but economy of scale is at work here. Industrial farms are usually many thousands of acres; in Eastern NY, the average farm is well under 500 acres. Yet local farmers live on their land, pay local taxes and buy their supplies locally—making their living from what they produce, and adding to their neighbors’ prosperity. But you have to sell a lot of lettuce and tomatoes to buy a new truck or afford a new television.

Robin and Allen Cockerline, Whipppoorwill Farm, sell most of their farm's output through their charming farm store

Farms Are a Precious Resource

Try to look at farms as a resource, equivalent to trees, iron ore, or even oil.  Once they’re gone, they’re gone—they’re only renewable if we support them. We should do everything we can to keep agriculture where we live. Do you really want to depend on other countries to supply our food?  Less than two percent of the United States population is farmers; they’re an endangered species.

And don’t forget our concerns about energy conservation: The average distance your food travels is 1,500 miles. That’s a mighty lot of time and fuel.

Build a Relationship with a Farmer and an Environmentalist

When buying produce at a farm stand or farmers market, you are building a relationship.  It’s personal. You can ask about his kids. You learn about a specific varietal. You can give feedback to the grower on what to grow next season. It feels good.

And farmers are environmentalists. To make your living from the land, you must take care of it. Growers are constantly doing good things for the land. They rotate crops, plant crop covers, and generally take care of the soil so it will take care of them. Besides providing open space for livestock and wild animals, farms provide green space to keep our water and air clean. In the long run, it is much better to have land in farms than in development.

Good Farmers Equal Safer Food

The food safety issue has probably done more to bolster local agriculture than anything else. There have been a number of food scares in the last few years. They have all been a result of the lack of “controls” on big, industrial farms. So much can go wrong on a big operation. Just think about the number of times produce is handled between when it is picked, rinsed, packaged, stored, loaded, shipped, unloaded, stored again, repackaged, trucked and then handled again before you buy it.  Local produce receives a minimum of handling. The people selling the produce are the ones who picked and transported it, and you have a personal connection them.

To me, all food is personal. You can tell when fruit and vegetables are fresh. You know it’s local if, when eating a peach, you need two or three napkins to soak up the juice on your face. You know a local tomato because there’s a difference between cardboard and flavor. Eating locally grown fruits is a pleasure that cannot be experienced year round. That’s what makes it so precious and so wonderful.