Vermont's Local Banquet Magazine Winter 2013

vermont’s

local banquet winter 2013 | issue twenty-three

Cranberries Pollinators in the Garden Vermont Hospitals Go Local

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issue twenty-three

4 Editor’s Note 6 Garden Pathways Inviting the Pollinators

8 Barnstorming Incarcerated Vermonters help save treasured buildings

10 Viewpoint A Localvore’s Dilemma

12 Reflections of a Restaurateur Part lV: From Jefferson to Jello

14 Set the Table with…

Cranberries

16 Eat Right Vermont hospitals begin serving local, healthy food

18 Seeds for Change A Mobile Market Finds Its Way

21 Winter and Holiday Farmers' Markets 27 Farmers’ Kitchen 29 Calendar 30 Last Morsel

Editor’s Note

Publisher Schreiber & Lucas, LLC Editor Caroline Abels

It can be comforting to walk into a Vermont farmers’ market—winter or summer.

Whether we’re frequent patrons or visiting from out of state, dropping by a market on a Saturday morning or Thursday afternoon can feel cozy and reassuring: all those farmers practicing healthy agriculture and guaranteeing our collective food security.

We may leave with a good feeling and not think more about the carrots or cabbage in our bag. But as one of the writers in this issue of Local Banquet alludes to, challenging and complex questions now abound in Vermont’s local food movement—questions that are a sign of the movement’s growth and maturity.

I can remember participating in one of the state’s first “Localvore Challenges” back in 2006. Our little group gathered for local-dish potlucks over the course of a week to learn from each other about how to eat locally. The biggest hurdles we faced were where to find local wheat flour, how to cook kale so that it wasn’t bitter, and…did sea salt from Maine count as local?

These may seem like quaint questions now, but only because local food production really took off in the late ‘aughts, and now it’s easier to find things like local wheat flour in Vermont. (Am I just speaking for a small sliver of the population, though? Might there be pockets of people in the state who need Localvore Challenges today the way my group did in 2006? As I said, those challenging questions…)

At Local Banquet, we’re delving into some of the conundrums. There’s a story by Khristopher Flack on page 18 about a Newport mobile farmers’ market that is wondering why its customer base was so low in its first year. On page 10 Caitlin Gildrien grapples with the “should I buy local or organic?” question. In our previous issue, a writer asked why we as a society label certain plant species as invasive and speak about them with such hostility. (Read one Vermonter’s response to her piece on our website.)

Then there are issues not raised in our pages (yet!). Was Green Mountain College right to have made plans to slaughter (for meat) a pair of beloved oxen who had worked on the college farm for years? (The debate went viral; Lou, who had been injured, was euthanized in November.) Should Vermont attempt to do what California just tried and pass its own “Prop 37,” requiring the labeling of GMO foods? How come the legislature didn’t ban gestation crates for pigs in its last session? Why are beginning farmers so unable to afford land?

Join the discussion on these and other issues by writing to us, or by penning an op-ed of your own for our new ”Viewpoint” section. As Local Banquet grows and matures alongside the movement we cover, we’d like to follow these fascinating threads as they weave together our local agriculture.

—Caroline Abels

On the cover : Cranberries from the garden of Ellie Hayes and Michael Gray, Woodbury, Vermont. Photo by Michael Gray.

Art Director Meg Lucas Ad Director Barbi Schreiber Proofreader Marisa Crumb

Contributors Sarah Alexander Barbara and Doug Flack Khristopher Flack Caitlin Gildrien Charmaine Kinton Suzanne Podhaizer Susan Z. Ritz Tatiana Schreiber Printed with soy ink on FSC certified 50% recycled chlorine–free paper Subscriptions, $22 Subscribe online or send checks to: Vermont’s Local Banquet PO Box 69 Saxtons River, VT 05154 localbanquet.com 802-869-1236 we welcome letters to the editor info@localbanquet.com

vermont’s LOCAL Banquet Mission Statement The purpose of our publication is to promote and support our local communities. By focusing on fresh, local, wholesome foods grown and made in Vermont, we preserve our environment, grow our economy, and enhance our nutrition.

Vermont’s Local Banquet (ISSN 1946–0295) is published quarterly. Subscriptions are $22 annually and are mailed in the spring, summer, fall, and winter. Please make checks payable to Vermont’s Local Banquet. Thank you.

Copyright (c) 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without written consent. Opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the publishers or editors.

Contents page : Guerrilla Grown Farm beets, photo by Sherry Maher.

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local banquet 5

garden pathways

Inviting the Pollinators

by Tatiana Schreiber Several years ago I was privileged to spend weeks and months at a time working in southern Mexico with organic coffee and cacao farmers. My first visit to a coffee farm is etched in my memory primarily through sound—the sound of bees. As I walked into the forest I saw coffee trees, yes, but also mango, banana, papaya and understory bushes and shrubs whose names I didn’t know. The hum of insects filled my ears. Only then did I look around and see that the trees were vibrating with the buzzing bees: it was flowering time in the coffee zone.

Of course we gardeners and local food enthusiasts want to assist pollinators, since they enable our crops to bear fruit. But, in a larger sense, pollination is also critical to life on our planet. It is pollination, or, to put it another way, plant sex that facilitates genetic mixing and therefore adaptation of plants to diverse climates and geographic conditions. It also allows humans to select and improve crops for specific flavors, textures, disease, and pest resistance, and to better meet our nutritional needs. Unless we believe that all of this can be accomplished through genetic engineering in laboratory conditions, we owe it to ourselves and future generations to do everything we can to enhance habitat for pollinators. 

Who are the pollinators? Honeybees, whose decline has been widely chronicled, are only part of the story. According to Stephen Buchmann and Gary Paul Nabhan, authors of The Forgotten Pollinators, there are some 80,000 other species of bees, wasps, and ants; some 20,000 species of butterflies and moths; 15,000 species of flies; 210,000 species of beetles; and thousands of birds, bats and other animals that contribute to pollinating the flowering plants of the world. Here at home, the Vermont Center for EcoStudies lists 21 species of bumblebees on its website, and these important pollinators, like our honeybees, are suffering for a variety of reasons, not all of which are clearly established. Habitat loss is likely a key factor, and evidence is mounting that the use of pesticides on gardens, lawns, and around our homes is also affecting insect health.

So what can be done? Of course we should make sure we have plants flowering from early spring to late fall to provide pollen and nectar. But if we want pollinators to stick around, we need to think not only of their needs during flowering but throughout their life cycles. They need places to meet their mates and reproduce, to bear young and raise them and, for overwintering species, places to settle down for hibernation. With this in mind, think of your garden as an agro-ecosystem, and of the land surrounding your garden as part of that eco6

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Illustrations by Constance M. Foot from Insect Wonderland, 1910. Courtesy of OldBookArt.com

After returning to Vermont and settling onto land that had been a farmstead in centuries past, I heard that sound once again, when bees enveloped the flowering ancient apple trees on my land. Lately the apples aren’t doing so well, and neither are the bees. There are fewer and fewer bees each summer, or so it appears to me, and changing weather patterns seem to be taking a toll on the semi-wild fruit trees that provided some of their sustenance. But my study of coffee and cacao farming in Mexico has convinced me that the strategies farmers there use to keep their fields productive and resilient can be applied to our own gardens and surrounding landscape in New England. A critical component of their strategy is providing habitat for bees and insects that provide pollination and other underappreciated services in pest control and decomposition. These creatures are also food for birds, bats and frogs, which in turn help keep our gardens healthy.

system. This is where the lessons from the agro-forestry systems of Mexico come into play. There, coffee and cacao are grown among a diversity of other plants, much like the natural forest. In addition, people grow gardens around their homes that include fruit trees and understory plants such as vegetables, medicinal plants, and plants grown for animal fodder or for construction materials. The transition between forest and garden, in some cases, is hardly noticeable. We can do the same in our own yards and gardens using systems sometimes referred to as “forest gardening” or “permaculture.” Short of taking a permaculture design course though, there are many ways that all of us can improve the situation for pollinators in our landscapes.

One book I turn to again and again is Insects and Gardens by Eric Grissell (with incredible photographs by Carll Goodpasture).

Grissell, an entomologist and zealous insect advocate, suggests that the key is increasing diversity in plant communities in and around the garden. Think about plant structure: some plants are upright, some are squat, some are trailing. Aim to increase this “architectural diversity” by having some of each size and shape throughout your landscape. Flower shape and size (and a palette of diverse colors) is also important—each plant catering to different pollinator desires.

also important pollinators. (Do keep a few spots bare though, as some bee species like exposed ground for their nesting sites.) 

To benefit our native pollinators, it is important to populate our gardens and landscapes with a wide variety of native plant species, since these have co-evolved with insects over time to meet each other’s needs. This is a great time of year to be thinking about what to plant next spring. Fedco Trees is a good source for a broad assortment of native flowering trees, shrubs, medicinal plants, and herbs. This year’s catalog (ordering deadline: March 8, 2013) includes a list of spring, summer, and fall blooming native plants that can specifically enhance pollination in the home orchard. Spring-blooming plants include wild geranium, wild lupine, and dandelions—not native, but nonetheless valuable to pollinators. (Once again, be less tidy: let those dandelions bloom!) Summer-blooming plants include milkweeds, JoePye weed, and monarda (bee balm). Plants that bloom in the fall include goldenrods and asters. The many species of goldenrod

Think about temporal diversity as well: plants develop and blossom at different times, so at any given time we should try to have plants at various stages of development to meet insect needs at all stages of their development. Interplant vegetables, herbs, and flowers throughout your garden and you will always have pollinators nearby when your vegetables need them. Companion plants like these provide a shelter for insect interactions (mating, eating one another—yes, it happens–laying eggs, etc.).

To provide refuge for overwintering insects, plant dwarf conifers and evergreen shrubs around the periphery of your gardens.

It’s not just the plants that create habitat diversity. Insects, including pollinators, also need water—a pond or wet swale or even a bird bath in summer will help meet pollinator needs. Soil diversity is important as well, since different insects need different kinds of soil for nesting. Some bumblebees, for example, like sandy soil, so you might want to reconsider any impulse to create uniform soils in your landscape. And different plants need different soil types, so soil diversity enhances plant diversity and thus creates a more complex insect habitat. Similarly, differences in exposure to sun are important to improve insect habitat so don’t eliminate all your trees in order to have a sunny garden!

Insects need shade as well as sun just as we do.

And last, don’t be so neat and tidy! Leave seedheads in the garden well into fall so that insects and birds can continue to forage among the plants. Allow flowering plants such as goldenrod and asters to proliferate around your gardens to provide nectar as long as possible in the fall. Keep most of your soil covered with mulch or messy garden debris, as many insects make their homes there. Many garden gurus advocate keeping your gardens free of debris for just this reason: to avoid providing a refuge for overwintering garden pests, such as vine borers and snails. However, as Eric Grissell points out, the best way to keep your garden free of pests is to make sure predator species (think spiders and ground beetles) also have habitat. Many of these predators, such as the various species of predatory wasps, are

attract a wide range of pollinators; sometimes the humming in the goldenrod near my gardens rivals the sound of those Mexican coffee trees at flowering time!

Other plants attractive to native bees include Amelanchier (serviceberry), Baptisia (false indigo), sunflowers, lavender, blackeyed Susan, brambles of all types, lamb’s ear, comfrey and tansy.

Fedco Seeds provides a “beneficial insect mix” of a selection of annual and perennial flowering plants that can be seeded in wide borders around and within gardens providing excellent pollinator habitat. Fedco recommends that plants designed to attract pollinators be planted in large clumps three or four feet in diameter so that pollinators can spot them from a distance.

In addition to planting a wide range of species and enhancing the architectural and structural diversity of one’s garden and surrounding landscape, there’s another critically important thing we need to do to improve the lives of pollinators. Don’t use pesticides! Pesticides of all kinds are designed to kill insects at all stages of their life cyles. Some of these target specific insect Continued on page 25

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local banquet 7

BARNSTORMING

by Sarah Alexander Barns, of course, are a staple in Vermont agriculture, providing a place to house livestock, store hay and grain, and keep farm vehicles and equipment. Unfortunately, though, their upkeep can be dauntingly expensive and time consuming, especially with cows to milk and food to produce.

Joe and Sylvia Maille of Shelburne have been farming for as long as they can remember. Joe’s parents purchased the dairy operation in 1919 and now Joe and his son Jim have further developed the original operation. The Maille family milks around 50 cows today and sells their milk to Dairy Farmers of America, a dairy marketing cooperative.

Until late October of last year, one of the Mailles' barns was in rough shape. Built in 1939, its interior sills and exterior siding had become rotten, it needed jacking up, and the silo called for a complete restoration.

“Honestly, I thought this barn was going to be something we would never be able to completely restore,” Jim told me. “The price of milk just keeps dropping while the price of fuel and labor continues to go up. When I first got the phone call I thought— c’mon, nobody seriously offers to paint your barn for free.”

The phone call was from the Vermont Barn Painting Project, which provides farmers with free labor and maintenance. The project’s rehabilitation work focuses on deteriorating barns and is performed by inmates in Vermont correctional facilities. For the Mailles, the restoration was performed in October by a work crew of women from the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility.

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When I asked about the progression of the project, Jim said, “They’re only on their second week here, but it looks great. They never stop.”

The pilot project is a partnership between the Vermont Agriculture Agency, the Vermont Corrections Department, the Preservation Trust of Vermont, the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation, the State of Vermont Chief Marketing Officer, and Vermont Works for Women. Allen Lumber, Sherwin-Williams, and Pizzagalli Properties provide donations and necessary funds.

This cluster of state agencies, nonprofits, and private businesses constitutes a unique collaboration. It meets the Agency of Agriculture’s mission to directly enhance landscapes for the growth and viability of local agriculture. And through the support of Vermont Works for Women, it assists women seeking purpose and a sense of accomplishment. It allows inmates to work as a team in a beautiful outdoor setting, provides them with useful vocational skills, and prepares them to enter the work force after the completion of their sentence. 

Upon my arrival at Maille Farm, I met Rachel Jolly, the director of programs at Vermont Works for Women (VWW). Rachel spoke of the extensive history that VWW has in making huge strides among women and girls. “We’ve done numerous carpentry training programs with incarcerated women, but nothing to this caliber—nothing that has them this engaged.”

Photo by Sarah Alexander; Amanda Griggs, bottom row second from left; upper left and bottom left Corrections Department administrators.

Incarcerated Vermonters help save treasured buildings

I had arrived at 11:00 a.m., 30 minutes before the crew took a lunch break. In that half hour, I observed six women—all non violent offenders—smoothly applying new coats of paint on the milk parlor door and removing siding from the top of the barn with the help of a gigantic boom, all while talking, smiling, and laughing.

As for the Mailles' Shelburne barn, it was not the first to be restored through this project. This past summer, the Gingue Farm in Waterford received a facelift thanks to an all-male work crew from the Northeast Regional Correctional Facility in St. Johnsbury. And almost three years ago, the Molly Brook Farm of Danville was restored.

Amanda Griggs was there, too. An organic farmer, potter, woodworker, and yoga teacher by trade and passion, Amanda was hired by VWW as the onsite safety and carpentry instructor for the Maille Farm project. “I love this role,” she told me. “It’s an opportunity and, of course, a challenge, but so rewarding. I get to see women do things they never thought they’d do.”

The farms that participate in the program are chosen for their geographic location. They must be close to the correctional facility where the workers would come from, but also near a highly traveled area, so that visitors and Vermonters alike can relish in a beautiful, restored agricultural landscape.

Amanda begins each morning with a basic carpentry lesson and leads the women in a short yoga class. Then they write down goals for the day, making sure to cross off each task as they finish.

“My favorite part is seeing how truly unselfish these women are,” said Amanda. “At the beginning of this project, I had the women write down their goals, and each and every person wrote servicing farmers, supporting agriculture, and helping others. They are truly happy to have an outlet for giving back to the community.”

To my surprise, many of the women, who chose to remain anonymous for this article, were more than willing to talk to me—excited, even, at the thought of a new face and fresh perspective.

Asked about what it was like working on the project, one of the women commented, “Your days go by faster, you leave tired, and you get to be outside. It’s also great to be able to help someone, especially a farmer, and in this current, weakened economy.”

Some women spoke of the joy of using a skill saw or a hammer, others of how they overcame their fear of heights by going up in the boom lift.

The women on the crew were all from a housing unit of nonviolent offenders at the correctional facility called the Delta Unit.

They were interviewed and chosen to join the crew based on their hopes and vision for the project as well as their experience.



As a writer, I usually leave an interview with quotations and scenes swimming through my head. I wonder how I can capture a certain idea, what will my catchy headline be—the list goes on.

But on this particular drive home, it was only the sound of laughter that echoed in my head. It was then that I began to realize just how much I have in common with these women from the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility. Their mid-work smiles and laughter sent me back to the summers I spent on farms— the working landscapes where I have felt the most in my element, the best, most true, version of myself.

Working on these farms provided me relief from the fast-paced college lifestyle I was so desperate to get away from. I imagine a similar relief was felt by the women at Maille Farm—serving their time in the open air, rather than behind bars. Whether it’s a freshly painted barn door or a bountiful harvest of beaming orange carrots, that incredible feeling of pride and accomplishment is the same.

Sarah Alexander lives in Burlington and is majoring in environmental studies at UVM. Her future plans include living on a few acres and merging her passions for writing and agriculture.

For now, she daydreams of raising pigs and driving her Volkswagon bus across the country.

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At NOFAVT’s 31st Annual Winter Conference, of course!

February 16 & 17, 2013 at UVM, Burlington Stop by our table and say hello, we love to see old friends and meet new ones. www.localbanquet.com

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local banquet 9

viewpoint

A Localvore’s Dilemma “Should I buy local or organic?”

by Caitlin Gildrien NOFA-Vermont It’s a sign of the maturity of Vermont’s sustainable agriculture and local foods movement that this has become a prevalent and perplexing question. Is it better to buy a local, organic carrot or one that’s just local? Even more challenging, is it better to buy a local, conventionally grown carrot, or an organic carrot from far away? What about other foods? Is local, organic beef any better than grass-fed beef from out West? What’s the difference, anyway—besides, maybe, the price?

The small scale of Vermont farming lends itself to family farms, direct marketing, and romanticism. It’s therefore easy to assume that all Vermont farmers are “basically organic,” with or without official certification. Certainly most farmers here farm conscientiously, with attention to issues such as soil health and animal welfare. Most farmers in Vermont care about their land, their crops, their animals, and their communities. So is organic certification necessary?

Fundamentally, for the consumer, organic certification means that a third party (in Vermont, usually that party is Vermont Organic Farmers, LLC, the certification branch of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, where I work) has verified that the product meets certain standards, which comprise the legal definition of “organic.” These federal standards reflect key principles of organic farming, such as enriching the soil, promoting biodiversity, and taking a proactive approach to animal health. You don’t have to inquire with a certified organic producer as to whether they use certain pesticides, or if their ani10 local banquet

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mals are routinely treated with antibiotics; the certifying organization has asked these questions for you.

If, however, you buy directly from a farmer who isn’t certified, yes, you have the opportunity to ask about practices such as pesticide use or grazing—but do you? For many people, the personal interaction at a farmers’ market or farm stand is about trust, and they may feel rude asking a producer if their berries have been sprayed or if their chickens were fed genetically modified grains. Sometimes the farmers themselves will use a phrase like “basically organic” to describe their practices, but they may or may not explain—or even know—in which ways their practices differ from those of a certified organic farmer. Though it’s unpleasant to think so, some could say they use organic practices when they actually do not.

If organic certification is a reassuring shorthand at farmers’ markets, it’s in the more traditional marketplace where it really can be of assistance. Bread, crackers, sauces, ice cream, and other processed foods, as well as milk, make up a large part of the products certified by Vermont Organic Farmers, as well as a large part of most people’s diets. In these cases, the certifier is asking the questions that the consumer has little opportunity to, since the makers of these foods are nowhere near the supermarket.

Additionally, in places with less access to farmers’ markets or a large numbers of factory farms, the assurance that comes with organic certification may be the only way for customers to feel confident about their food choices.

Before the USDA organic program was established and began enforcing a single legal definition of the word organic in 2002, there were many certifiers with different standards and many more people calling themselves “organic” with no definition besides their own. This system presented few problems back when “organic” was a marginal part of the food economy and most organic products were sold locally. But as the number of organic growers increased—and as large food corporations began to take notice of the value that some consumers placed on organic food—the lack of a clear meaning of the word became problematic.

So the USDA, with help from existing certifying organizations such as Vermont Organic Farmers, crafted a set of standards to define organic. Now nothing labeled organic can legally contain GMOs, sewage sludge, synthetic pesticides or herbicides, antibiotics, artificial hormones, artificial colors or flavorings, or preservatives. All organic animals must have access to the outdoors, and organic ruminants (cows, sheep, and goats) must be on pasture during the grazing season. Sick animals treated with antibiotics cannot be sold as organic, so farmers must take a proactive approach toward herd health. Similarly, produce from land treated with synthetic fertilizers cannot be sold as organic, so farmers must take a proactive approach toward soil health. Producers must keep careful records and are inspected every year.

It is true that the standards aren’t perfect. It is true that you can buy certified organic versions of many junk foods, and that many large-scale organic companies are owned by even larger conventional ones. And it’s absolutely true that farmers can be skilled, careful stewards of the earth without organic certification. At NOFA Vermont, we recognize that many farmers choose not to get certified, for a number of reasons. The cost of certification can seem prohibitive (although there is a reimbursement program), and the paperwork is extensive (although some farmers are surprised to realize they’re already keeping all the records required). Some farmers may disagree with the organic standards for being either too stringent or not stringent enough. Some simply feel they don’t need certification to communicate their practices.

As for what to buy once you can be sure of a producer’s farming practices, much of your choice hinges on what you value about your food. People choose food based on taste, price, health, animal welfare, and/or community—just to name a few. When you choose something as simple as an egg, you must decide if it is important to you whether the chickens were fed non-GMO grain, whether they may have been treated with antibiotics, or whether they were scratching outside eating grass and bugs. Then you must decide how much it is worth— in dollars, as well as food miles and your time—to obtain the food that meets those criteria.

Available throughout the region at:

In Vermont, we are lucky to have hundreds of certified organic farmers and processors, producing everything from carrots and eggs to burgers and bread, so if you don’t want to choose between local and organic, you don’t have to. Find a certified organic producer who grows locally—and learn more about the organic standards—on our website, nofavt.org.

Harlow Farm Stand Walpole Grocery Springfield Food Co-op Putney and Brattleboro Food Co-ops or…

As for those non-certifed farmers who consider themselves “basically organic”?

You’ll just have to ask them what that means.

Caitlin Gildrien coordinates outreach for the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, the parent organization of Vermont Organic Farmers.

With the help of their toddler, she and her husband also grow two acres of vegetables at Gildrien Farm in Leicester. The farm is currently being transitioned to certified organic production.

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local banquet 11

One of Thomas Jefferson’s favorite snacks was anchovy deviled eggs. He was also wild about fresh peas, and several of his surviving handwritten recipes are for creamy French desserts. I know this because at my Montpelier restaurant, Salt, we once spent several weeks cooking and serving dishes that were common at fancy Monticello dinner parties or inspired by the late president’s extensive garden.

handmade ravioli in a pot of boiling water, those items disappear, and she has to start from scratch. Similarly, every 21 days, the waitstaff must memorize an entirely new list of 13 dishes (5 appetizers, 5 entrées, and 3 desserts), complete with details about cooking techniques and the farms from which we’re sourcing. We also have to keep a close eye on what we buy, since ordering too many black beans or too much cornmeal might mean keeping the extra in storage for several months, until the menu allows them to come back around in a different form.

With modern photographs of Jefferson’s Virginia estate on display in the restaurant—an artichoke in bloom, a bean vine winding around a pole— I regaled customers with tales But there are enough upsides of the founding father’s dining to make these strenuhabits and information about ous menu rotations worththe heirloom fruit and vegewhile. Our jobs never feel table seeds that he collected rote, because a few days after on his travels and lovingly we’ve begun cooking the new brought to the new world. menu, we’re brainstorming As I did, the chef ladled out about what will come next. By chilled lettuce soup, slathered by Suzanne Podhaizer the same token, our custommushroom ketchup onto veal ers can drop in once a month meatloaf, and tossed fresh and, despite our tiny list of noodles with tomato conselections, never eat the same thing twice. In fact, we’ve got cusfit and creamy cheddar sauce. Then, a few days later, we pulled tomers who rarely miss a menu. down the photo show and began a new menu, which focused on Spanish-inflected fare such as chicken-liver and caramelized-onion While frequent customer visits are a boon for the bottom line, the final reason for the ever-changing menu is the one that is empanadas, almond and green-grape gazpacho, and paella. closest to the heart of our mission: sourcing locally. Because we As you may know, Salt specializes in farm-to-table cuisine. Our update our offerings so frequently, we can buy from the smallest goal is to take the goods that nearby farmers have available and farms—ones that don’t have as much to supply, or as many custurn them into creative and delicious dishes. But these days, that tomers, as larger farms—and as long as they can keep us in spinisn’t particularly unusual. Hundreds of Vermont restaurants use ach, pork chops, or feta cheese for a few weeks, that’s enough at least a modicum of local produce—think of the obligatory for us. Ideally, just as they run out, we’ll be asking for Swiss chard, mesclun salad with maple vinaigrette and sliced apple—and beef ribs, and chèvre instead. While most dining establishments many of the best are driven by their collaborations with growers. must buy from someone who raises thousands of chickens per So when we opened in December 2010, the chef and I decided to year, we can get away with buying from those who raise hundo something unusual: change the menu completely every three dreds. Or we can support somebody completely new by comweeks. While some restaurants tweak their menus a little bit every mitting to their entire batch of animals or the whole harvest of a day so that the offerings change and evolve over time, and othparticular crop. ers do a quarterly overhaul, no other establishments I know of do However, when we’re sourcing from farms with limited supplies, quite what we are doing. sometimes things don’t go as planned. When the weather isn’t

Part lV: From Jefferson to Jello

Why? From the standpoint of typical business practice, it’s completely nuts. As soon as the chef has gotten used to the rhythm of searing duck breast, deep-frying pork belly, and dunking 12 local banquet

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in our farmers’ favor, and the frost takes out everybody’s lettuce at once, we might need to change what’s in the salad on the fly.

When poultry doesn’t fatten up as expected, and the birds aren’t

Chef Courtney White, at the Montpelier restaurant Salt, making dried kale “seaweed” flavored with miso, tamari, and orange. Photo by Caroline Abels.

Reflections of a Restaurateur

ready to be slaughtered on schedule, something that seems as basic to our menus as chicken can be impossible to find.

As the year wends on, fewer and fewer local items are available. And sometime around November, we reach a point when we realize that it will be five months or more before we see a single new crop. Anything green—a few leaves of spinach or the tops of scallions—seems precious. It can be tough to stay creative when faced with a larder filled with beets, cabbage, carrots, potatoes, and little else. Sometimes, it’s hard to stay out of the culinary doldrums.

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And that’s where themes come in: Every time we change the menu, the chef and I pore over the list of locally available ingredients, decide which ones excite us, and then choose a thread that will tie all of those items together. The theme can be based on the cuisine of a particular region of the world, or of a historical era, like our Jeffersonian selection. It can even be inspired by a work of literature or a film.

This December, when the film version of The Hobbit comes out, we’ll have a menu based on foods mentioned by Tolkien. It will work beautifully, because he writes about turnips and sausages, cakes and ale, all of which are perfect when it’s slushy and cold outside. This past summer, as soon as farmers began harvesting paper-husked tomatillos, we put them to work in a Mexican menu. I was particularly enchanted with last year’s Alice in Wonderland menu, one that featured the color red on every plate, and another that showcased upscale versions of food from the 1950s (think tuna-pea-wiggle made with fresh pasta, seared tuna belly, and pea shoots—and Meyer lemon jello).

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While frequent customer visits are a boon for the bottom line, the final reason for the everchanging menu is the one that is closest to the heart of our mission: sourcing locally.

Selecting a theme helps to keep us out of ruts and makes it so that every appetizer complements every entrée, and every entrée leads smoothly into each dessert—no culinary discord allowed. Just as important, it ensures that we’re perpetually doing research and learning new techniques. When it comes time to write a cookbook, we’ve got hundreds of recipes we’ve developed, it’s just a matter of choosing which ones we want to use.

When I first opened the restaurant, speaking openly about the themed menus made me a little nervous. Good ingredients and good technique form the basis of our concept, and I didn’t want people to get the sense that we’re kitschy. After all, it’s not exactly typical for a restaurant to serve pierogi, borscht, and homemade kielbasa one week, and the next, offer shrimp and grits, smoked catfish and barbecued ribs.

That said, it’s also not typical for a restaurant to procure food the way we do; to make it work, we need to break what might seem like inviolable rules of “the biz.” That we can do so in a way that keeps customers coming back for more, and gives us the opportunity to innovate and continually educate ourselves, means that all of the aspects of the business are working in concert. Kind of like a delicious meal.

Suzanne Podhaizer is the owner of Salt in Montpelier. She’s been obsessed with food since she was a youngster. She designed her own degree in “Food Studies” at the University of Vermont, and spent four years working as the food editor at Seven Days.

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local banquet 13

Set the Table with…

Cranberries

by Charmaine Kinton The Land of Bog is a mysterious world of acidic, sandy peat soil and an abundance of water. Here live the cranberries: low-trailing vines with small evergreen leaves and tart, wine-colored berries.

They are wise and venerable plants that theoretically can live forever; some cranberries on Cape Cod are more than 150 years old. Being native North American berries, they were popular with Native American humans, especially for use in pemmican but also as a medicinal and dye plant.

Many people envision cranberries growing in water but actually, they don’t. They do require lots of irrigation, and growers flood the fields periodically for harvest, pest control, and frost protection. To create a natural boggy habitat, cranberry beds are dug down, not built up. The topsoil is removed, leaving a dike around the bed. The bed is then layered with sand, leveled, furnished with a sprinkler system, and planted. Ditches allows for irrigation and drainage.

Some of our most treasured food items seem to be those that generate a special little world around their production. How are cranberries tended and harvested throughout the year, and who is selling them in our state?

••• A year in the cranberry bog begins in spring, when the winter floodwaters are drained from the beds and the plants begin to grow. Sprinklers are used to protect the buds from spring frosts. The beds may be re-flooded for a short time as a way to control pests and weeds. As the plants open their pink flowers, beehives are brought in for pollination.

The timing on this is critical, as cranberries are not the most popular with bees, so growers wait until a substantial percentage of the bog is in bloom; otherwise the bees will opt for wild weeds.

Summer is relatively uneventful. Weeds are handpulled or treated with herbicide, and growers monitor insect pests and treat for them as needed. As native plants accustomed to the low nutrient levels of a bog, cranberries do not require much fertilizer compared to most agricultural crops.

Things start getting more exciting in fall. As the weather gets colder, frost damage becomes a concern. The cranberries are turning red, and the redder they get, the more frost hardy they become.

But on really cold nights they need the extra protection of a rather magical—and somewhat counterintuitive—law of physics: the Heat of 14 local banquet

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Fusion. Growers use sprinkler systems to spray the fields, and the water freezes on the berries. During the freezing process, heat is released, actually warming the plants.

Cranberry harvest happens from September through November. There are two types of harvest: wet and dry. Dry harvesting combs the berries from the plants and must be done under completely dry conditions—which can be a challenge as the Northeast gets wetter. Cranberries harvested this way (only 5 to 10 percent of the U.S. crop) are used as fresh fruit. The majority of cranberries are harvested by flooding the fields. A special “water reel” or “eggbeater” machine then floats through, stirring up the water and dislodging the berries from the plants. Cranberries have hollow pockets inside (look and see!) so they float. The floating berries are rounded up like wild horses, using plastic or wooden booms, corralled, and scooped up. These wet-harvested berries must be frozen or processed immediately and are used for things like juice and sauce.

Fresh dry-harvested cranberries are graded at receiving stations before being shipped out to stores.

The screening process is based on color and the ability to bounce.

Overripe or damaged soft berries will not bounce, but a healthy berry will. Sorting machines use a series of bounce boards to eliminate the ailing berries.

The berries that manage to leap the gates are then sorted by hand for other defects and for color.

At some point after harvest, depending on weather, the bog is flooded again. The water freezes and the cranberry plants are suspended in a crystal world of ice, safe from the harsh forces of winter. Winter is also the time for the curious practice of sanding.

Every few years, a homemade sander is driven over the ice, spreading an even layer of sand. When the ice melts, the sand gradually sifts down between the vines. This helps control weeds, fungi, and pests. It also improves drainage and helps stimulate new growth of the roots and vines. This technique was discovered in the early 1800s when a Cape Cod

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grower, Captain Henry Hall of Dennis, observed that cranberries grew better in bogs where sand blew in from the dunes.

••• Vermont Cranberry Company in Fairfield is the pioneer for production in Vermont. Bob and Betsy Lesnikoski started their operation in 1996 and have been slowly and steadily expanding ever since. “I had heard that Massachusetts growers were expanding into Maine,” Bob says, “so I thought we could do it here.” Cranberries require a combination of sandy, acidic soil, lots of water, and a climate that provides sufficient winter dormancy. Vermont has the climate and the water, the sand can be provided, and Bob applies organic sulfur in years when there’s not enough “natural” acid rain.

A former logger, Bob was in position to move easily into cranberry production: “The basic construction of cranberry bogs is a lot of excavation. I had the equipment and the know-how.” The Lesnikoskis currently have roughly three acres under production, yielding 35,000 pounds annually, and Bob says they will eventually top out at five acres or so. It takes approximately five years for a bed to get up to speed on producing.

The farm uses mainly organic growing methods. Because they are the only grower in the area, disease and pests are “not much of an issue.” tThey sand every other winter, do a spring flood every other year, and on alternate years apply organic pesticides for cranberry fruit worm and fruit rot. “You can’t kill the plant,” Bob says wryly, “but there’s a lot of little things you can do wrong and that will stay with you for at least two years because of the physiology of the plant.” He uses a combination of pollinators, actively maintaining bumblebee and wild bee habitat by leaving stump piles and not mowing around the beds.

Harvest takes approximately three weeks in early October and is a busy time. Like commercial growers, the Lesnikoskis use sprinklers to protect the plants from freezing. “I’ll probably be up allnight, making sure the pumps are running—they freeze up and plug up,” says Bob. His good-natured attitude at the prospect of an all-night vigil belies the critical importance of the practice: severe frost damage can occur in as little as 20 minutes and can result in the loss of the entire crop for one year.

In contrast to large commercial operations, most of the Vermont cranberry crop is sold fresh and so is dry harvested, using a small, walk-behind, motorized combine in the beds and old-fashioned, hand-held rakes for the ditch edges. A cleanup flood is then used to float the berries that were missed, using the usual system of booms to corral the berries. These wet-harvested berries are used for juice and other processed products. Most of the dryharvested berries will be sold within six weeks of harvest.

Vermont Cranberry produces a single-strength, unsweetened juice that is sold wholesale to local companies like Aqua Vitea Kombucha in Bristol, Champlain Orchards (which uses it in their Cranberry Apple Cider), and Boyden Valley Winery (for their award-winning cranberry wine). This fall, Vermont Cranberry will

also package some of their juice for retail sale. They also have a line of specialty products, such as sweetened dried berries, which they sell at farmers’ markets and from their website, vermontcranberry.com.

••• If you’re feeling ambitious and enterprising, you can try growing your own cranberries. Ellie Hayes and Michael Gray of Woodbury purchased 24 plants from Cranberry Creations (cranberrycreations.com) in Maine two years ago and installed them in raised beds in the sometimeswet end of their lower garden. They spaced the plants about four feet apart, allowing room for the runners to root and eventually fill in the bed. Michael also adds both peat and sand periodically throughout the growing season, as well as an organic, acidifying fertilizer but does no extra watering.

CRANBERRY CRAMMING b The name “cranberry” is allegedly based on the resemblance of the plant’s flower to the neck, head, and beak of a crane (the bird, not the machine). They were also sometimes called “bearberries,” as bears were often observed eating them. b T he ver y first commercial cranberries were planted in 1816 in Dennis, MA, on Cape Cod, and the first cranberry cooperative was established in 1904: the Wisconsin Cranberry Sales Co. b In November 1959, the American cranberry crop was contaminated with traces of the herbicide aminotriazole, resulting in the collapse of the market and the loss of millions of dollars.

The incident made growers realize that they needed year-round market sales, not just holiday sales, so they developed new products such as juice blends. b Growers often use the winter season to repair, design, and build their own specialized equipment.

Commercial companies have not ventured into cranberry production equipment because there are fewer than 1,000 growers in North America.

For winter protection, they used a layer of row cover topped with 6 to 12 inches of mulched leaves. “Last fall was —Charmaine Kinton the first time we put them to bed,” says Ellie. But when the row cover came off in the spring, the plants looked terrible. Fungus was the culprit. “We probably covered them too early—this year we’re going to wait until Thanksgiving or maybe later to cover them.” The plants did recover nicely and produced roughly a quart of cranberries this past fall.

When purchasing fresh cranberries for your holiday meals, be sure to save a few for use in a Bouncing Berry party game. (There isn’t an official version of this, so everyone is free to creatively invent their own…perhaps after a few glasses of cranberry wine.

Cranberry pong anyone?) And for a magical holiday visit to the Land of Bog, be sure to read Wende and Harry Devlin’s Cranberry Thanksgiving and Cranberry Christmas with your family.

Artist and writer Charmaine Kinton is on pilgrimage through the U.S., eating exotic local foods and writing a young adult novel. She is also the booking agent for Seattle singer-songwriter, educator, and activist for social, economic, and environmental justice Mike Spine. Reach her at ckinton@rocketmail.com.

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local banquet 15

Eat Right

Vermont hospitals begin serving local, healthy food to patients and visitors.

by Susan Z. Ritz If you haven’t eaten at your local hospital lately, you don’t know what you’re missing. No, seriously! Over the past few years, Vermont medical facilities have traded in their Fry-o-lators for sauté pans, canned and processed foods for local and organic fruits and veggies, and sugary soft drinks for lightly sweetened iced teas. Instead of hot dogs and French fries, many Vermont hospital cafeterias now showcase a well-stocked salad bar sporting signs that inform diners which local farms grew the lettuce, tomatoes, and crudités. At some of the larger hospitals, patients can even order room service and choosing from a menu of locally produced, primarily organic, and antibiotic- and hormone-free seasonal dishes delivered right to their bedsides at almost any time of day.

The impetus behind these culinary changes is the Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge created by Health Care Without Harm, an international organization that promotes green and environmentally sustainable initiatives in health care facilities around the world. The pledge is a broad framework that outlines steps hospitals can take to improve the health of patients and their wider communities while giving local farmers a stable market for their sustainably grown products, leading to a cleaner, healthier environment for all. Since 2005, almost 400 hospitals nationwide have signed the pledge, making a commitment to “first do no harm” by treating food—its production and distribution—as preventative medicine.

“We focus on baby steps,” she says, “working one-on-one with each facility to figure out what make sense for each individual hospital. We’re not asking them to completely overhaul their systems, just find the things they can reasonably do and are passionate about. It’s about starting small and building on success.” For example, change may be as simple as switching from apples grown in Washington State to apples grown in a nearby orchard. It’s a simple act that has multiple effects, adding fresher food to the menu, educating the larger community and expanding the market for the farmer. 

Fletcher Allen's rooftop garden, beekeeping operation, and executive chef Richard Jarmusz 16 local banquet

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Since Alyssa came on board in 2008, she has seen Vermont become a national leader in the farm-to-hospitals movement. Currently, 11 out of 15 Vermont hospitals have signed the Healthy Foods Pledge, giving our small state the highest percentage of engaged medical facilities in the country. Vermont’s agricultural heritage, growing network of small organic farms, and commitment to work2 0 1 3

Photos courtesty of Fletcher Allen.

According to Alyssa Nathanson, Vermont coordinator of the Healthy Food in Health Care Initiative, “The pledge is a nonbinding, purposely vague document that lays out ideas and suggestions for hospitals to take as they work on creating sustainable food systems right inside their facilities.” Alyssa, who is hosted by Vermont Fresh Network and funded through a grant from Health Care Without Harm, provides technical assistance to the pledged hospitals across the state and builds relationships with their food teams, including dieticians, chefs, and buyers, to help them find ways and means to incorporate healthy, locally produced foods into their operations.

ing landscapes have certainly been major factors in creating that success.

Another major factor has been the leadership provided by Fletcher Allen Health Care, which signed the pledge in 2006 and became the third hospital in the nation to do so. Under the creative and dynamic leadership of Director of Nutrition Services Diane Imrie, Executive Chef Richard Jarmusz, Procurement Specialist Scott Young, and their culinary team, Fletcher Allen in Burlington has partnered with more than 70 local farmers and food producers to offer a wide selection of delectable, locally grown meals in their cafeterias and hotel-style, in-patient room service. Fletcher Allen is now the state’s largest restaurant, serving up to 5,000 meals a day that feature hormone- and antibioticfree meats and dairy products, organic salad and fruit bars, wildcaught fish (mostly from the Northeast), whole-grain breads, and home-baked, low-fat snacks. Its flagship Harvest Café attracts not only staff and visitors but also a growing clientele from the Burlington area who appreciate the wholesome food and reasonable prices.

Through its Center for Nutrition and Healthy Food Systems, Fletcher Allen is also a mover and shaker in the movement to bring local food to hospitals of all sizes across the state and beyond. Working closely with Alyssa Nathanson, Diane Imrie organizes farm visits, workshops, retreats, and other outreach programs for health care center food professionals from Vermont, New England, and the nation. The center also trains culinary staff at other hospitals so they can get the hang of cooking from scratch, using fresh local ingredients rather than the packaged, processed foods most hospitals have relied on for years.

These classes encourage staff to step out of their cooking comfort zones and to try some unfamiliar foods, like beet greens and kale. Recently, Diane took a group on a field trip to Gloucester, Massachusetts., to learn about sustainable fisheries, meet the fishermen and discover new ways to incorporate fish into hospital menus. As a follow-up, Fletcher Allen sponsored a seafood “throw down” in October, pitting a number of local medical facilities against each other to see which could come up with the best fish recipe.

In addition, the center’s rooftop garden, beekeeping operation, and weekly farmers’ market (open to the public but primarily frequented by hospital staff ) help educate the larger community about the deep-rooted connections between health, nutrition, and sustainable food systems. As Alyssa points out, “Seeing a farmers’ market when you pull up to your doctor’s appointment is a great message,” and it’s one that more and more hospitals are sending. 

Transitioning to healthier foods is not always easy, however.

Ginny Flanders, nutrition and food service director at Northeast Vermont Regional Hospital in St. Johnsbury, heard lots of grumbling when she first took Tater Tots off the breakfast menu and replaced them with locally produced home fries. A monthly Meatless Monday option never really took off despite Ginny's’ best efforts to educate her cafeteria customers on the environmental and health costs of daily hamburgers and hot dogs.

Undaunted, she and Executive Chef Shawn Hilliker (former chef at Kharma Choling, a Buddhist retreat center nearby) decided

to offer more vegetarian entrées and soups on the daily menu instead. “This gives people a choice rather than having it mandated,” says Ginny, who became an early adopter of the Healthy Food Pledge when she signed on in 2008. She is also working on reducing the consumption of sugary sodas, as are many other local hospitals. Instead of banning them altogether, however, she has reduced the size of the drinks offered from 12 ounces to 8. The kitchen also sets out a big container of iced tea each day, as another cost-effective alternative. Customers pay for it only by donation. “This cuts down not just on sugar, but also on plastic bottle waste,” Ginny says.

Education is an integral part of the pledge, so the NVRE cafeteria uses signs on the food to let customers know their meals include items from Vermont vendors such as Vermont Soy, Green Mountain Yogurt, and Bill Half’s Harvest Hill Farm in Walden. “Bill now does a summer CSA for us and about 50 staff have signed up. They can even use their wellness benefits [from the hospital] to pay for it.”

Many of the older patients at Gifford Hospital’s skilled nursing facility in Randolph used to be farmers themselves and are happy to see the names of farms that have been around for generations on their daily menus.

“Overall,” Ginny continues, “we hear very positive feedback. People love to come to the cafeteria because it’s reasonably priced.

We can keep the prices low because the hospital supplements us. They trust in what we’re doing. If we are going to be a health care institution, then we need to make food a cornerstone of all we do.”

Of course, health care costs are already high, and local, organic food can certainly increase the bottom line for any hospital food service team. But Jamie Baribeau, director of food and nutrition at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, has found that he has been able to keep costs at a reasonable level. “It’s actually a cost saver,” he says of the room service meal option. “Patients order what they want instead of getting a standard hospital tray. There’s a lot less waste this way—that’s why a lot of hospitals are going with this approach. Patient satisfaction is very high and we save money at the same time.” Jamie also controls costs by ordering local vegetables when they are seasonally available. The fact that BMH receives its food from 12 to 15 different farms “used to make ordering hard, but now we get [the food] through the Windham Farm Fresh Network, which coordinates deliveries to local schools as well,” he says. The Network aggregates orders, creating an efficient delivery system that cuts both administrative and transportation fees. “Through the Network, we can order online and we can see what even small farms have to offer.”

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seeds for change

A Mobile Market Finds Its Way

by Khristopher Flack A little after 10:00 a.m. on a chilly October morning in Newport, the traffic at the intersection of Main street and Coventry street is as steady as usual. Traffic lights turn, some cars move, others stop; the rhythm of routine here is strong.

But at the edge of this routine, along the curb, Meghan Stotko is doing something eye-catching: building a multi-tiered display of local food that’s part billboard, part art installation. In front of a large white truck, she fills sap buckets and bushel baskets with potatoes and tucks them between the steps of a wooden ladder. She stacks towers of winter squash like firewood. She arranges bunches of red kale between half pints of farmers’ cheese that rest next to loaves of warm bread from the bakery down the street.

Meghan is the market manager for The Lunchbox, a new mobile farmers’ market and commercial kitchen launched by Green Mountain Farm-to-School that aims to bring fresh food from dozens of local producers, along with food education, to lowincome and limited-food areas around the Northeast Kingdom. The project began in Newport in September with weekly pop-up markets in the parking lot of a local bank and has ambitions to also have market days in Irasburg, North Troy, and Island Pond. But more than a market alone, The Lunchbox hopes to be a mobile toolbox for anyone in the area to use to improve their access to healthy food and community programs.

aren’t banging on our doors asking for this because they don’t feel like it’s a movement for them.” 

On paper, it seems like The Lunchbox would expect a messianic welcome wherever it travels. As the project's initial market manager, I also expected that the 31-foot-long, FedEx-style step-van hand-painted with a colorful logo would have little problem announcing itself.

But it only takes a couple of hours standing in the parking lot of a bank with your hands in your pockets and hail falling around you to wonder what the facts, figures, and programs that got you there really mean to the people you’re looking to serve— people who are looking at you, and the food displays behind you, with glances that say what numbers can’t. Furrowed brows want to know what “that thing” is. Squinting eyes try to piece together “T-H-E L-U-N-C-H-B….” And all of those shuffling feet that hesitate for a moment when they notice the truck just keep on shuffling.

“Rutabaga may be really unfamiliar and foreign to people,” says Katherine Sims, executive director of Green Mountain Farm-toSchool and project manager for The Lunchbox. “They may not want to buy it without knowing how to prepare it and knowing that it tastes good and that it’s cheap and simple. So I see our commercial kitchen as a demonstration kitchen. You can try butternut squash soup, get excited about it, take home the recipe, and the raw product to make it at home.”

“We’re trying to make sure that the local food movement is about food access for everyone,” Katherine says. “We’re not forgetting about people up in Island Pond and North Troy who 18 local banquet

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“You offer all these things and the whole equation is in place to make it affordable and the incentives are there and everything else, but how do you actually get people out from their home and into the market?” Meghan asks. “You can’t just show somebody or tell them what they need to do—say to someone, ‘Buying this will make you healthy.’ You have to show how it’s feasible.”

In the Northeast Kingdom, where more than $500 million in redevelopment plans were recently announced by Jay Peak’s Bill Stenger—along with the promise of thousands of new jobs— the question of how a major investment in a well-intentioned project such as The Lunchbox translates into real improvements in peoples’ lives is a hot one. The Lunchbox itself is supported by a two-year, $97,000 grant from the USDA’s Farmers’ Market Promotion Program, most of which helped purchase the truck and outfit it with a commercial kitchen. It took most of the first year

Photos by Khristopher Flack

The communities The Lunchbox expects to serve were chosen based on their exceptional need for affordable fresh food.

According to USDA data, Newport is part of a multi-county “food desert,” where nearly 40 percent of people have low access to such foods. The data focuses on two barriers—cost and transportation—so the The Lunchbox’s thesis seems perfectly logical: bring food to people where they are, at a price they can afford, and they’ll choose to buy healthy local products. By putting the market on wheels and setting it up at established gathering points within each community, such as senior centers, The Lunchbox cuts transportation challenges out of the equation.

Furthermore, it brings down the cost of local food by accepting food stamps and Harvest Health coupons, which match food stamp purchases up to $10.

to get the market on the road, and with few customers in the first month of business, it’s natural to begin searching for a possible mismatch between perceived needs and people’s actual response. But Katherine and Meghan are proceeding with poise, open minds, and a humbled appreciation for the nuances of the project at hand.

“It’s all very simple, except for the fact that it’s very complicated,” jokes Meghan, who admits that she has spent more time learning how to operate the truck’s generator and install its equipment than selling food. “Once one market was open, the act of buying the food, coordinating with farmers, figuring out a financial situation, accounting, record keeping, installing equipment in the truck….I mean all of those things add up to a lot of time in ways you don’t necessarily expect. But this is just a little nugget of what we’ll be able to do in the future.”

What’s been a little more immediate for The Lunchbox has been finding a way to make the program work for the growers who supply it. The Lunchbox buys all of its product outright from producers at their retail price, without adding a markup of their own—meaning that the 100 percent of the price Lunchbox customers pay goes back to the grower or producer. Many of these producers are new growers in their 20s or older backyard gardeners who don’t have enough food to justify their own farmers’ market booth; The Lunchbox can offer a new entry point into the local food market for these super-small-scale growers. Some producers have also benefited from using The Lunchbox’s commercial kitchen to preserve excess harvest and make a viable product to sell at farm stands or markets that wouldn’t accept home-processed foods.

Adam Favaloro is one such producer. He is one half of Four Acre Farm, a diversified veggie farm in Barton that he opened this past season with his best friend from third grade. Two of their melons sat on the market table, waiting for buyers, the day I spoke to him.

“We’re so limited on person power that we can only go to so many markets per week, so the idea that this goes all around the Kingdom is great,” he said. “It’ll get our name and our product out to towns we’re not marketing to directly. It’s a lot of good publicity for growers.”

While this doesn’t add up to a steady revenue stream for the market portion of The Lunchbox, Meghan expects to be able to fund the project beyond the USDA grant by marketing The Lunchbox as a unique farm-to-table catering service and food truck for special events. She also plans to eventually offer a menu of freshly prepared foods during market day. 

But first, there’s a pensive winter to get through and lessons from this pilot season to sculpt into a project that meaningfully reaches the people it’s attempting to serve. Drawing on her background as a chef, as well as on Green Mountain Farm-toSchool’s educational resources, Meghan will spend the winter developing a meal plan and classes for Lunchbox shoppers. The classes will show how a family of between four and six can supplement store-bought staples with produce from The Lunchbox to create a week’s worth of affordable, healthy meals. She also plans to spend time doing outreach to existing partner organi-

Meghan Stotko greets a customer zations and people in market communities so that come spring, communities will better understand what The Lunchbox is about and how it can be useful.

“The day-to-day of the local food movement isn’t so sexy,” Katherine says. “It’s a lot of hard work and it doesn’t happen overnight, but we keep knocking on doors and people are excited.

And that’s what keeps us moving forward. If the food is yummy, people will come. If it looks good and it’s exciting and inviting, people want to come and learn about it and if they like what they learn, they’ll keep coming back. Part of that is persistence, and reaching out and inviting people to come and check it out and be offering a good thing when they do.”

It all adds up to a brave and innovative attempt to address not just one, but many of the most intimate and intricate challenges in our food system, in a way that apparently no one else has tried in such a thoroughly rural environment. Although The Lunchbox won’t be bragging about its sales this season, it can be proud of crafting an innovative approach to improving food access that acknowledges the complexity of the problem.

Even if it experiences some early struggles, those struggles are refreshing because they represent an ongoing attempt to not just provide more food to more people, but to fundamentally reskill people, reconnect people, and address food access not just as an economic issue, but also as a cultural issue, and ultimately, a personal issue.

To what extent one project can affect so many facets of peoples’ lives remains to be seen. But as she dismantles a day’s display of produce among the traffic of downtown Newport, Meghan sees the frontier ahead. And if The Lunchbox is ever going to get there, she sees you joining her.

“You’re kind of forging out into the unknown,” she says, “and in doing so, there are a lot of things…that aren’t going to happen in the best way, that are only going to be learned about in hindsight. I would like the support of everyone in the communities we work with to positively channel feedback back to this truck and be on its side and just know that it’s a work in progress and that it’s open to being a work in progress with those communities, that that’s it’s nature. That’s a pretty important thing.”

Meghan Stotko and The Lunchbox can be reached at mstotko@gmfts.org.

Khristopher Flack is a writer, former Lunchbox market manager, and co-founder of Fresh Start Community Farm in Newport.

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good stuff in... good stuff out

the fine art in food

your fresh connection blackriverproduce.com

local food, A Family Feed Company

Pet Food, Bird Seed, Equine, Pet and Stable Supplies, Tack, Hay & Shavings

Open Monday—Friday 9:00-5:30 Saturday 10:00–2:00 802–365–7800

larger good

Located on Riverdale Road, Townshend behind the

Locally owned and operated, offering the West River Valley a full service meat & seafood department, fresh produce, store made salads and lunch specials from our deli, and a complete selection of beer, wine & groceries.

Open 365 days a year!

Rte 30, Townshend 802-365-4600

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Feed your body, mind, and community with the help of our friendly staff and wide selection of local products.

Springfield www.springfieldfoodcoop.com

802.885.3363

Holiday and Winter Farmers’ Markets Bellows Falls Winter Farmers’ Market

Champlain Islands–South Hero Winter Farmers’ Market

Train Depot, Bellows Falls 3rd Friday of each month throughout the winter, 4–7pm Rachel Ware 802-463-2018 bffarmersmarket.com Accepts EBT and debit cards

South Hero Congregational Church on South Street 1st and 3rd Saturdays in December 2012, 10am–2pm Denise Boutin 802-372-3291 champlainislandsfarmersmarket. blogspot.com Accepts EBT and debit cards

Bennington-Walloomsac Holiday and Winter Farmers’ Markets Baptist Church on East Main Street December 1 and 15, 2012 10am–2pm 1st and 3rd Saturdays January through April 2013, 10am–1pm Katherine Keys 802-668-7210 walloomsac.org Accepts EBT and debit cards

Bradford Farmers’ Market Grace United Methodist Church 2nd and 4th Saturdays October 27, 2012 through April 27, 2013 Holiday Market on December 8 Iris Johnson 802-222-5434 facebook.com/bradfordfarmersmarket

Thanks to VTFMA, NOFA-VT, and the Vermont Agency of Agriculture for providing this list.

Brattleboro Winter Farmers’ Market 153 Main Street, Brattleboro Saturdays November 2012 through March 2013, 10am–3pm between Thanksgiving and Christmas, 10am– 2pm all others Sherry Maher 802-869-2141 For information on special events check the events calendar at postoilsolutions.org/farmersmarkets Accepts EBT and debit cards

Burlington Winter Farmers’ Market Memorial Auditorium Corner of Main Street and S. Union 3rd Saturday November 2012 through March, 2013, 10am–2pm Chris Wagner 802-310-5172 burlingtonfarmersmarket.org Accepts EBT and debit cards

Craftsbury Winter Farmers’ Market Sterling College, Simpson Hall 3rd Saturday of each month, November 2012 through April 2013, 4–7pm Kristin Urie 802-755-6878

Dorset Winter Farmers’ Market J.K. Adams Kitchen Store and Factory on Rte. 30 in Dorset Every Sunday October 14, 2012– February 24, 2013, 10am–2pm Nicole Henry 518-222-1149 dorsetfarmersmarket.com/ Accepts EBT and debit cards

Groton Growers’ Market Gym at the Groton Community Building 3rd Saturday from October 2012 through May 2013, 10am–2pm Jennifer Bone at 802-584-4067 grotongrowers@gmail.com

Hartland Winter Farmers’ Market Damon Hall, Routes 5 and 12 Hartland Three Corners December 14, 2012, 4–7pm Allison Bembe 802-436-3399 hartlandfarmersmarket.com

Londonderry–West River Winter Farmers’ Market Masonic Hall Schoolhouse on Middletown Road December 8, 9am–12pm Brooke Decker 875-5004 westriverfarmersmarket.com Accepts EBT and debit cards

Ludlow Farmers’ Market Corner of Main and Andover streets Saturdays November 2012 through March 2, 2013, 9am–1pm Jerry Milligan 802-734-3829 lfmkt@tds.net ludlowfarmersmarket.org Accepts EBT and debit cards

Middlebury Winter Farmers’ Market

Rutland County Holiday Market

Mary Hogan Elementary School 201 Mary Hogan Drive Saturdays in December 2012 and in March and April 2013, 9:30am–1pm (No market held in January and February 2013) December 1st special holiday market held at the municipal gym downtown Middlebury 9am–2pm (contact Sharon Kerwin, orangecatsoaps@ yahoo.com) Jeremy Gildrien 802-247-4699 middleburyfarmersmarket.org Accepts EBT and debit cards

College of St. Joseph Friday December 2, 10am–5pm and Saturday December 3, 9am–4pm Bob Murphy rutlandcountyfarmersmarket.org

Montpelier–Capital City Farmers’ Winter Market

St. Albans–Northwest Winter Farmers’ Market

Vermont College of Fine Arts, 36 College Street 1st and 3rd Saturdays December 2012, January and March 2013 2nd and 3rd Saturdays, February 2013 1st and 4th Saturdays, April 2013 10am–2pm Carolyn Grodinsky 802-223-2958 montpelierfarmersmarket.com Accepts EBT and debit cards

Norwich Farmers’ Winter Market Tracy Hall, 300 Main Street 1st and 3rd Saturdays December 2012 and 2nd Saturdays January– April 2013, 10am–1pm Steve Hoffman 802-384-7447 norwichfarmersmarket.org Accepts EBT and debit cards

Putney Holiday Market Green Mountain Orchards 130 West Hill Road Sundays December 16 and 23 11am–2pm Marisa Miller farmermarisa@gmail.com putneyfarmersmarket.org Accepts EBT and debit cards

Rutland Holiday Fairs of Vermont

Rutland Winter Farmers’ Market Vermont Farmers Food Center West Street Saturdays November 3, 2012 through May 4, 2013, 10am-2pm Doug Patac vtfarmersmarket.org Accepts EBT, debit, and credit cards

St. Albans City Hall Dates to be decided December 2012 Marnie Barry 802-373-5821 nwvtfarmersmarket.org Accepts EBT and debit cards

St. Johnsbury Winter Farmers’ Market St. Johnsbury Welcome Center Railroad Street 1st and 3rd Saturdays December 1st Saturday January through April, 10am–1pm Elizabeth Everts 802-592-3088 Accepts EBT and debit cards

Waterbury Winter Farmers’ Market Thatch Brook Primary School gym 2nd Saturday November 10, 2012– April 13, 2013, 10am–2pm waterburyfarmersmarket.com Accepts EBT and debit cards

Windsor Winter Farmers’ Market Windsor Welcome Center 1st and 3rd Sundays November 18, 2012–April 21, 2013, 12–3pm Steve Proctor 603-675-5840 windsorfarmersmarket@blogspot.com Accepts EBT and debit cards

Rutland Holiday Inn December 18, 2012, 9am–4pm Jamie Condrill 802-287-9570 vtfarmersmarket.org

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• • • • • • • • •

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Come paint with Charlie March 12-17, 2013 in Grafton, VT. Sleet, snow, sugar houses, local food, drippy landscapes and a whole lot of fun.

EAT RIGHT Continued from page 17

Since signing the Healthy Food Pledge in 2009, Jamie has adopted a number of innovations, many of which reach well beyond the walls of the hospital, including a seasonal recipe blog and community dinners emphasizing the heart-healthy Mediterranean diet. His Maple View Café is reputed to sell the best clam chowder in the area, as well as freshly baked chicken pies as a take-out item. BMH also has a farmers’ market in front of the hospital where staff and visitors can buy produce and get to know the farmers who grew it. “We’re happy to support the community that supports us,” he comments.

Terry Redmond of Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin echoes this sentiment: “Hospitals need to be leaders, not followers, in the localvore economy.” Terry signed the Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge in 2010 after already having made many modifications, such as getting rid of steam tables and Fry-olaters. He is proud to say that CVMC’s Mountain View Café “has the best salad bar in the area,” stocked with produce from the Two Rivers’ Center’s Farm-to-Table program. It also features a broad selection of entrées and seasonal soups prepared by Executive Chef Justin Turcotte, Kitchen Manager Shawn Wolf and their staff trained at the New England Culinary Institute. NECI also helps design and evaluate the food selections.

This year Terry has focused on upgrading in-patient service through “Room Service 4 You,” which operates much like Fletcher Allen’s. Patients’ nutritional needs are evaluated when they enter the hospital and their made-to-order meals are designed to address their medical needs. “Patient menus offer entirely local entrées, with grass-fed local beef, Manghi’s and Red Hen bread, and shrimp from Maine," says Terry Redmond of Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin. "We even try to add a bit of ethnic heritage by cooking French and Italian meals.” Black River Produce, which combines orders from Vermont farms and delivers to

many local schools as well as hospitals, helps make local buying easy. 

Besides offering the benefits of health and environmentally sound practices, local foods in hospitals can also offer comfort, especially to many of Vermont’s elders. Alyssa Nathanson points out that many of the older patients at Gifford Hospital’s skilled nursing facility in Randolph used to be farmers themselves. They remember the days when eating local was the only option and they are happy to see the names of farms that have been around for generations on their daily menus. Residents of Wake Robin in Shelburne, which became the state’s first retirement community to sign the Healthy Foods Pledge in 2011, are also passionate about going local. A gourmet dinner series, as well as a locally based menu in the restaurant and cafeteria, introduces this lively bunch of seniors to new trends in agriculture and helps them feel vitally connected to local farms.

There are still some areas in which each hospital would like to grow and improve. Reducing waste, expanding compost programs, and continuing to wean clientele off sugary sodas are all common goals for the near future. And Fletcher Allen is working on ways to track the long-term quantitative health benefits of this new approach to hospital dining, again leading the nation with its evolving evaluation practices. In the meantime, Vermont’s hospitals are working hard to dispel old myths about hospital food. They invite us all to stop in and taste for ourselves the big difference that the Healthy Foods in Health Care program has already made.

Susan Z. Ritz lives in Montpelier where she is a freelance writer and creative writing teacher. She has previously served on the boards of several Vermont arts, environmental, and women’s advocacy groups but is currently hard at work on her first novel.

Vermont

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a a Champlain Orchards Shoreham, Vermont (802) 897 -­ 2777 r www.champlainorchards.com ch r a

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216Main MainSt. St.• Poultney • Poultney 216

(802) 287-4550 (802) 216 Main St. •287-4550 Poultney stonevalleymarket.com stonevalleymarket.com (802) 287-4550 stonevalleymarket.com

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SINCE 1902

COMMUNITY F E E D S TO R E E QU I N E

Green Mountain Tent Rentals

Te n t s Ta b l e s Ta b l e w a r e Chairs Dance Floors Lighting Restroom Services

802–365–7839

A Family Feed Company

8–5 Monday–Friday 8–2 Saturday Closed Sunday

BLUE SEAL

1–800–691–8368

Contributing Local Farms

Full menu available with daily food and drink specials.

More than 35 beers to choose from.

Extensive wine list.

DAIRY POULTRY & P E T S

Junction of Rte. 5 and 123 Westminster Station, VT 05159 802–722–9852 commfeed@gmail.com

Townshend Park, Route 30, Townshend, VT 05353

Ross • Luke • John Evans www.greenmtntents.com gmtents@svcable.net

R

Harlow’s Farm Old Athens Farm LMC Ranch Hope Roots Farm Pete’s Stand

Your Community-Owned Market and Deli

THURSDAY OPEN MIC 8 PM MON –FRI • 4 PM till 11PM SAT • 2PM till 11PM SUN • 12PM till 11PM FULL MENU EVERYDAY AT 5 PM SEVEN DAYS A WEEK

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32 The Square, Bellows Falls, Vermont (802) 463-9404 Store Open Daily Full Service Independent Bookstore - Books, Gifts & Toys

Order Books & e-Books 24/7 at

www.villagesquarebooks.com

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Holiday & Birthday Gifts for All Ages

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Mon– Sat 7–9 pm • Sunday 9–9 pm 2 Main Street, Brattleboro, VT www.brattleborofoodcoop.coop

POLLINATORS Continued from page 7

Farmers rsetat J.K. ADAMSMarke o D

t

pests (some of which are the larvae of important pollinators) and others are broad-ranging in their target species. Even pesticides approved for organic use can be problematic. Spinosad, an “organic” pesticide recommended for numerous garden pests, is highly toxic to bees and butterflies. It is suggested that it not be used when pollinators are likely to be around. But don’t we want pollinators around most of the time?

Sundays 10 AM ~ 2 PM

J.K. AdAms Kitchen store route 30 dorset MARKETMANAGER@DORSETFARMERSMARKET.COM WWW.DORSETFARMERSMARKET.COM

SHOP FRESH, SHOP LOCAL 40 regional producers bringing veggies and fruits, grass fed meats, award winning cheeses and wines, maple syrup and honey, freshly baked breads and pastries, specialty prepared foods, cut flowers, pottery, paintings, jewelry & more!

EBT AND DEBIT CARDS ACCEpTED Here again, thinking of our gardens as part of a larger agro-ecosystem can be the key to not only protecting pollinators, but also to protecting our own health and the health of our food supply over time. By improving habitat for pollinators, we also improve habitat for birds, bats, and predatory insects. Ultimately this proliferation of insect and animal life in our yards and gardens—our own habitat after all—is our best hedge against any damages we may suffer from pests. We must measure the short-term gain of cosmetically perfect broccoli against the benefits of increased productivity and the long-term well-being of the myriad species of pollinators upon whose lives we depend.

snow or shine!

Tatiana Schreiber marvels at the wonders of insect-plant interactions at Sowing Peace Farm, her farmstead in Westminster West. In Chiapas, Mexico, she did research with organic coffee and cacao farmers for her doctorate in environmental studies and worked as a public radio journalist there for several years.

She can be reached at tatianas@sover.net.

SHARE A TASTE OF VERMONT Serving local, grass-fed Beef & Bison! Lean, low-fat, heart-healthy, high in omega-3’s - burgers, steaks, stews, bison dogs & more!

Grass-Fed Beef from Winterview Farm of Springfield, VT - Bison Burgers & Dogs from Yankee Farmer’s of Warren, NH

Savor the experience of inspired American cuisine, thoughtfully prepared with locally sourced food.

Enjoy the candlelit ambiance of The Old Tavern restaurant (open nightly), or choose the Phelps Barn Pub for casual dining (Thurs-Sun).

92 Main Street, Grafton, VT 05146

GraftonInnVermont.com

800-843-1801

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J.D. McCLIMENTs Pub Mu ral by Jamie Towns e nd

Pub opens at 4:00 pm

Tuesday through Saturday Dinner is served from 5:00 pm to 9:00 pm

WA AWWE W e

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Rt. 5 Putney, VT • 802-387-4499 jdmac@sover.net • www.jdmcclimentspub.com

M a r k e t

feat uring farm fre sh lo ca l produ ce , e ggs, da i ry produ ct s , h um anely raised g rass fe d me a ts, ch e e se s, ou r o wn ga rde n f r es h salad s, hom em a de sou ps, fre sh ba ke d bre a ds, a nd pi e s .

Ron’s

Husqvarna

We will be having POP-UP re sta u ra nts fro m ti me to ti me feat uring loc al c hefs a nd loca l fa rm pro du cts, sta y tu n ed b y joining our em ail e ve nts li st & “ fri e ndi ng” u s o n fa ce bo o k to k eep up wi th th e da te s, ch e fs a nd me nu s!

FOREST & GARDEN

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T hu r s day & Friday 8:3 0-5:3 0 S at urday & Sunday 10-5 Cl ose d Mo nday, Tues day, & Wednes day AT THE JUNCTI ON OF ROUTES 103 AND 10 IN CHESTER 802-875-FOOD www.waawwe.com-follow us on facebook!

Winter

Farmers Market Corner of Main and Andover Streets Every Saturday November 17, 2012 to March 2, 2013 9am-1pm

Ron Greenwood Sales & Service 104 Riverdale Road Townshend, VT 05353

Tel. Bus: (802) 365–9778

Rural Needs From A To Z Est.

1952

R. B. Erskine, Inc. Grain & Supplies Chester Depot, VT

802-875-2333

www.ludlowfarmersmarket.org • lfmkt@tds.net Jerry Milligan • 802-734-3829

Mon. - Fri., 7:30 - 5:00; Sat. 7:30 - 3:00

EBT/Debit cards accepted

For Everything Maple Hidden Springs Maple Farm Store Family Owned and Operated Visit us for a real taste of Vermont!

Summer Hours (Jun-Dec): Tues-Sun 10-6 pm Winter Hours (Jan-May): Thurs-Sun 11-5 pm

Free Maple Syrup Tasting Table Bulk Syrup $5/lb—B.Y.O. container Hand-Dipped Ice Cream!

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Certified Organic

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I-91 N to exit 4, take Rte. 5 to Putney Village (½ mile) and turn left at the Putney General Store. Take Westminster Road for 1/2 mile.

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In State (800) 635–9778

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f a r m e r s ’

Farm & Ferment

by Barbara and Doug Flack Flack Family Farm

We believe the nutrient density of food is a product of vibrant soil life, which is created through both remineralization and the rebuilding of a variety of complex soil carbon structures. Plant communities such as pasture and cover crops provide energy, carbon, and nutrients to soil organisms, which are central to the development of high-functioning soils. Higher-functioning soils result in fermented vegetable products that are abundant in minerals, enzymes, vitamins, and other health-giving substances, along with masses of necessary bacteria.

How do we know when fermented vegetables are healthier?

They taste great! Great taste reflects energetic and nutrient density, which attracts eaters, nourishing and delighting them. For millennia, foods containing diverse lactic bacteria at high densities—in particular, fermented vegetables and cultured milk— were the core of human health and are sorely lacking in modern diets. They are still used in many non-industrialized cultures as condiments to aid digestion, as life giving elixirs, sandwiched with meat, added to salads, and so on.

In 2000, when our kimchi (spicy, pickled cabbage and the national dish of Korea) appeared in stores and on our website, inquires came from all over the United States. Instead of shipping, we chose to remain local and to share our knowledge and methods through mentoring. We invite people every fall to help us make lacto-fermented foods—sauerkraut and kimchi— on our Franklin County farm and to join us in a festive lunch of diverse farm-raised foods. Visitors, as helpers, come from the west coast and everywhere in between. Doug enjoys speaking to audiences about traditional diets and nutrient-dense farming.

Recently, our friend Ernst Michel, raised in a traditional Swiss village, prepared an elaborate meal on our farm for 18 people. It integrated sauerkraut into numerous dishes such as kraut tarts, pork chops, roasted sausages and goulash. Here is one of his recipes.

Barbara and Doug Flack run Flack Family Farm in Fairfield. They produce vegetables, medicinal herbs, grass-fed meats, raw milk, and eggs. Their products are sold in natural food stores throughout central and northern Vermont and are served in local restaurants.

For more info visit flackfamilyfarm.com.

Tart

Sauerkraut Tart

1 cup whole wheat flour 1 tsp. salt 7 tbs. butter (melted) approximately ¼ cup cold water (more if needed) Mix flour and salt in a bowl. Add melted butter and water, stirring it all in at once. Mix to a smooth, firm dough; do not knead. Flatten dough in plastic wrap or in a plastic bag; cool for 1 hour. To form, roll out dough on a little flour to ¼ inch thick and form edges. Place in a greased 12-inch pan. Prick dough with a fork several times.

Filling 1 tsp. oil 16 ounces of raw sauerkraut ¼ cup apple juice or 1 apple, finely grated 1 tb. salt a pinch of nutmeg and pepper 1 tb. sweet mustard 10 ounces of dry sausage (summer sausage or chorizo); cut 2/3 of the sausage into small cubes and slice the rest diagonally into thin slices.

Heat the oil in a heavy pan. Sauté sauerkraut in the oil, add the apple juice or grated apple, bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer for 5 minutes or so, until the liquid has evaporated. Add the sausage cubes and season with nutmeg and pepper.

Brush the pastry dough with mustard. Spread the sauerkraut mixture on the dough. Add the following on top of the sauerkraut mixture: 1/3 cup sour cream 2 eggs, slightly beaten salt and pepper to taste Arrange sausage slices on top. Bake in the 12-inch pan for approximately 35 minutes in the lower half of a preheated 425 °F oven. Serve while still hot. Serves 4–6.

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k i t c h e n

Our farm is centered around regeneration, inspired by Rudolf Steiner and more recent developments in the rebuilding of high-functioning soils and plants. We regard our farm as a selfcontained entity, with its own organ systems (microbes, fungi, cattle, etc.), character, economic, social, and ecological life. Its relation to the greater cosmos is important; we choose the times for planting and harvesting by the position (influences) of the sun, moon, planets, and constellations. The ebb and flow of the tides and swirls of currents are more overt examples of influential forces.

SANDY’S 132 Elliot Street Brattleboro, Vermont 05301 802-257-4922 www.tjbuckleys.com

“Feed the Mind, Feed the Belly” 767-4258 * Open 7 days * 7:30 am–6 pm

W I N T E R FA R M E R S M A R K E T

BRATTLEBORO

Every Saturday 10–2 pm (Open til 3pm between Thanksgiving and Christmas)

November 3 through March 30 at the River Garden 153 Main St. Brattleboro

L ocal F r u it , Pr odu ce, M eats, Eggs, W ine, Pr es er v es , Baked Good s, L u nch Caf e, L iv e M u sic , Hand-Cr af t ed Holiday G if t s & More.

EBT & Debit Cards Welcome More info: 802.869.2141 or farmersmarket@postoilsolutions.org Local food and the warmth of community

S e r v i n g ou r C om m u n i t y

~ Local Products and Whole Foods Cheese & Dairy Baking Flours Pasture Raised Meats Kombucha Fountain Apples & Cranberries

Squash & Alliums Beans & Grains Honey & Maple Syrup Herbal Tinctures Celebratory Decorations

~ Extensive & Unique Gift Selection Come talk to us.

Our staff is knowledgeable and friendly. ~ Donation Site for Local Food Shelf

Providing for your holiday gatherings and everyday living.

193 North Main St, WRJ, VT (802) 295-5804

Rte 30 Newfane, VT

Full Lunch & Dinner Menu Nightly Seafood, Steaks & Pasta Specials Rick’s Famous Pizza Homemade Desserts www.rickstavern.net Like us on facebook

uppervalleyfood.coop

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Closed Tuesday 802-365-4310

MONDAY All Day Wing & Beer Specials WEDNESDAY 25% Off all Pizza THURSDAY Appetizer Specials FRIDAY All-U-Can-Eat Fish Fry SATURDAY Live Acoustic Music 7–11pm SUNDAY All-U-Can-Eat Prime Rib New Menu Items Too

Now Serving Certified Angus Beef Vermont Microbrews Free Birthday Dinner Takeout Always Available FREE Wi-Fi Only 15 mins. from Brattleboro

CALENDAR December 4, 7pm

Food, Energy, and the Enviornment Film Series

Green Mountain College, Poultney Films will be shown every Tuesday throughout December at the Tiny Theater on Main Street. There is a $2 suggested donation for those who are not yet members of the Tiny Theater. greenmtn.edu

December 4, 11:30am–1:30pm

Addison County Farm Animal Homeopathy Study Group

Taconic End Farm, Leicester Open to all levels. Great peer support: learn how other farmers are applying homeopathy to their herds or flocks. A relaxed discussion that usually includes an indepth look of at least one remedy, some theory, and a case analysis. Bring your resources, if you have them, and a current or past case that you would like to discuss.

247-3979, foxclag@gmavt.net

December 9

Rural Vermont Benefit Contra Dance

Stone Church, Brattleboro Join Rural Vermont and our friends at Brattleboro Contra for a night of great fun for a great cause! Never contra danced? Contra dancing is an upbeat, accessible, community dance tradition that is deeply rooted in the culture of rural New England. The figures and steps are simple to learn, the dances will be taught and prompted by the evening’s caller Rebecca Lay,

and there will be live music by talented performers, including local favorite Ethan Hazzard-Watkins among others. All proceeds benefit Rural Vermont!

223-7222, ruralvermont.org

January 19, 8:30am–3:30pm Stone Wall Workshops

Hinesburg Introductory stone wall building workshops for homeowners and tradespeople promote the beauty and integrity of stone. The one-day, hands-on workshop focuses on the basic techniques for creating dry-laid walls with a special emphasis on stone native to Vermont. Workshops are held inside warm greenhouses in Hinesburg. The one-day workshop is $100.

318-2411, queencitysoilandstone.com

January 29, 30, and 31, All day Vermont Farm Show

Champlain Valley Exposition 105 Pearl Street, Essex Junction This is Vermont’s premier winter show. As Vermont’s agricultural initiatives stay true to their roots and diversifies, the show only gets better. Commercial farm exhibitions and agricultural displays. A growing Vermont tradition year after year. Vermont’s largest farm show plays host to a number of annual meetings held by agricultural organizations across the state, from beekeepers to sugar makers to dairy farmers. Free admission and free parking.

828-3490, vtfarmshow.com

February 2

Jr Iron Chef VT

Champlain Valley Exposition 105 Pearl Street, Essex Junction Join Vermont FEED and the Burlington School Food Project for the most inspiring, fun, and wildly alive culinary event of the year! Jr Iron Chef VT is a cooking competition for middle and high school students from all across Vermont that should not be missed.

Teams of 3–5 students each have 90 minutes to create a dish using seasonal, local foods that is also delicious, nutritious, AND can be served in school cafeterias.

434-4122, jrironchefvt.org

February 9, 8:30am–3:30pm Stone Wall Workshops

Hinesburg See January 19 listing for details.

318-2411, queencitysoilandstone.com

February 15, all day

2013 NOFA Vermont Winter Conference

University of Vermont, Burlington We’ll be back at the University of Vermont in Burlington, VT, hosting more than 60 workshops on organic farming, gardening, homesteading, and consuming, with a devoted track to innovation. Other highlights include networking opportunities, keynote speakers, round-table discussions, exhibitor show, delicious (local and organic) meals, and of course, some dancing (wouldn’t be NOFA-VT without it)!

434-4122, nofavt.org

CERTIFIED Bob-White Systems, Vermont’s Own Micro-Dairy Source, is now a certified dealer for A&L Labs animal and equipment care products AND the exclusive U.S. distributor for Milkplan bulk coolers from Greece.

From the most trusted name in dairy for more than 60 years, we carry 2.5 gallon sizes of: • Pipeline & Utensil Detergents • Acids & Sanitizers • Teat Dip • Udder Washes & Wipes

Europe’s leading brand offers state-of-the-art milk cooler designs and manufacturing: • • • •

15, 30, 60 & 80 gal sizes All stainless construction Outstanding reliability Simple maintenance

Unbeatable prices Unmatched service!

Shop our store or online at

BobWhiteSystems.com or call

802-763-2777

228 Chelsea Street, PO Box 365 • South Royalton, Vermont 05068

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LAST MORSEL

In the 1930s, writers for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) chronicled the eating habits of Americans. Here are some Vermont excerpts, as collected in Mark Kurlansky’s The Food of a Younger Land:

From “Vermont Foods” by Cora Moore Sour Milk Doug hnuts: No nati ve Vermonter goes without doughn uts for breakfast, even if mother has to get up before-hand to make them. Th e recipe?—2 cups of flour, 3/4 teaspoon soda , 1 teaspoon of cr eam of tartar , 3/4 teaspoon of sa lt, and a dash of nutmeg sift ed together.

Add a beaten egg, 1/2 cup sugar, tablespoon me lted butter, and 1/2 cup sour milk . Knead on th e board adding flour, if necessary; cut and fry in de ep fat. For Su gared Doughnuts, wh en cool, shak e in a bag with so me confection ers’ sugar. Bluebe rry griddlecak es are a Vermont Sunday mornin g breakfast.

From “Eating in Vermont”

by Roaldus Ri chmond As a rule Ve rmonters are not enthusia stic about salads or fi sh, favorite s with the soph isticated, although Verm ont gardens and Vermont lakes and streams offe r a wealth of possibilit ies for both dishes. Fanc y foods and frothy things are not popular in th e state, whose people go for plain, solid, substantial foodstuffs.

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Photos from the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.

Reprinted from The Food of a Younger Land by Mark Kurlansky by arrangement with Riverhead, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., Copyright © 2009 by Mark Kurlansky.

Together, Better Choices ...like partnerships with local non-profits.

Join us for City Market’s 15th Annual COTS Tree Sale starting December 5, 2012. All proceeds benefit The Committee on Temporary Shelter. COTS is an important community partner advocating for long-term solutions to end homelessness.

82 S. Winooski Ave. Burlington, VT 05401 Open 7 days a week, 7 a.m. - 11 p.m.

(802) 861-9700 www.citymarket.coop

Thyme to Cook a kitchen store

Cookware, bakeware, gadgets, chef utensils, and cook accessories

e

802-428-4077 competitiv rices are p r u o www. thymetocookvt.com – l a c o l Rt. 5 Rockingham, VT Buy

CALEDONIA SPIRITS & WINERY HARDWICK, VERMONT TOURS AND TASTINGS Monday—Saturday 802.472.8000

Using local and regional honey, corn, elderberry, and barley.

Barr Hill gin and vodka, Caledonia elderberry cordial www.caledoniaspirits.com

at Exit 6 off I-91

“There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.”

--M.F.K. Fisher

Fresh & local farm to plate cuisine

Mary’s at Baldwin Creek I-91 exit 4 · open 7 days

802.387.5866 www.putneyfood.coop

1868 N 116 Road, Bristol, VT 05443 802-453-2432 ▪ innatbaldwincreek.com

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High Mowing Organic Seeds

NOFA Vermont's

31st annual

Winter ConferenCe

Generations of

Innovation

February 16 &17, 2013 • University of Vermont, Burlington 65+ workshops, TED-inspired talks, roundtables, & networking for commercial growers, gardeners, homesteaders, and organic consumers.

Great food, seed swap, collective art project, dancing, & celebration!

Mimi Arnstein, Wellspring Farm

Learn more, register, & meet our exhibitors and sponsors at www.nofavt.org/conference

www.nofavt.org/conference 802-434-4122 • info@nofavt.org