FARM STAND MARFA NEWSLETTER NOV 8

The Waters Effect, Alice Waters Talks About What is Important

A recent visit to Boston to see my youngest daughters at school luckily coincided with the golden turning of the leaves and an encounter with Alice Waters. Alice was in town to discuss the world food crises and the need to promote local and seasonal agriculture with august members of the Harvard intelligentsia.  

Alice reported that Michael Pollan's article, Farmer In Chief, What the Next President Can and Should Do to Remake the Way We Grow and Eat Our Food (New York Times Magazine, October 12) was much quoted at the Harvard gathering and helped to carry the debate from crises to vision through to practical solutions.  If you have not yet read Pollan's piece, you are in for a treat. In the writing you will find a voice for your questions about the future of food.
www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html

The morning I accompanied my husband, Ham, and to collect Alice from her Hotel, she was dressed lightly and comfortably in mysterious layers of deep purple varied colored silks inspired by the cultures of Asia. The occasion of our meeting and the day spent together revolved around an event being hosted by our friends at Gaining Ground a sprawling organic farm in Concord, Massachusetts. Situated on property that declares itself the birthplace of Thoreau, the 17-acre farm is managed by gardener, Verena Weiloch. With the help of more than a thousand volunteers, Gaining Ground donates its produce to area meal programs, food pantries and families in need.

Before making the short drive to Concord, Alice had a few stops to make in Boston. First we visited Sofra, an Eastern Mediterranean bakery and café opened recently by Ana Sortun, chef and owner of the celebrated Oleana, an Arabic restaurant that also emphasizes Turkish fare.  Hot and cold mezze provide the lunchtime temptations at Sofra, but mornings find the bakery decorated with pastries -flaky, creamy, and sweet - that shimmer in their own honey-colored light. We left laden with bags stacked with kunefe, Palace bread, Egyptian shortbread, herbal croissants and more unknown, unpronounceable delights.

Preferring the savory to the sweet, Alice claimed only a small tub of baba ganoush and pita bread. Ham and I were left with all the breakfast treats to taste, which I hoarded and sampled before sharing them with my husband, since he was driving.  After eating a few pastries and tasting the rest, I was reminded that I am better off as a gardener amidst raw vegetables and fruits, than as a chef or a food maven whose consumption would require constant vigilance.

Our next stop was just around the corner in Cambridge - Mount Auburn's Cemetery.  Walks in old cemeteries always calmed her, Alice told us.  Something she does before giving talks, I noted to myself, and hurried after her. She was standing in a pool of gilded leaves, looking up at a tree at least a century old. As the three of us toured the lush, garden-like cemetery founded in 1831 and read the names on the blackened and pitted gravestones, the early morning October sunlight filtered through the canopy of yellow and red leafed trees towering above us.

Then we were off to the luncheon event in nearby Concord. Beforehand we visited the farm at Gaining Ground with Stona Fitch, a writer of dark political novels who had until recently been the long-time president of the non-profit. Gaining Ground serves a dozen meal programs, operates a weekly direct donation of fresh produce to 25+ local families and administers Read for Seeds, a third grade read-athon in which the children raise 10% of the organization's yearly budget.

At the farm we met the current president of Gaining Ground, Lisa Troy, a nutritionist, with an understanding of the food and hunger issues facing local, national and global populations. The garden by now had largely been harvested and was being put to bed for the winter. Still, a row of fat cabbages, spread out as large as lily pads, greeted us near the entrance. The perennial herb garden was decorated with footstones made by schoolchildren.  Along with dried stalks of sunflowers, a stand of amaranth had been left to feed the birds. We watched an excited third grade class make dolls from cornhusks. Some of the young students tackled a wheelbarrow of red corn and began to remove the dried ruby-like kernels of the ancient seed from its cob.  Leaving, we picked raspberries from fall bearing canes and ate them before they could disintegrate in our warm hands.

The luncheon hosted by Gaining Ground was held in a newly constructed barn on Fairhaven Hill.  The view from the barn looked onto Fairhaven Bay, whose footpaths and marshy edges had been tramped by Thoreau. Fifteen miles further east the city of Boston sat in a coastal mist that softened the steel and glass verticals, and made timeless the turn of the century brick structures and industrial stacks.

Ham had helped to arrange for Alice to visit Concord to celebrate the work of Gaining Ground and to encourage its supporters to advocate for healthy school lunches.  As strong as the sugar maple dropping its leaves around us and as delicate as a rose in bloom, Waters easily persuaded us to become disciples for change in the schools.  What better place to begin than the school cafeterias with their institutional ingredients and smelly steam tables, where the best lunches consist of hamburgers, pizza and macaroni and cheese.  "Why not fresh cucumbers and carrots on the tables," declared Alice, "and roasted chicken resting on a warm bed of polenta served on a china plate."

While we listened to Alice talk, we were served a meal by the young chef, Jho Kokubo, whose restaurant, Kitchen on Common, in nearby Belmont, MA, serves mostly fresh, locally grown food.  We dined on white bean croquettes with Ancho chile remoulade and pickled shallots, a subtly curried dish of fall vegetables and roasted beets encircled in their greens. A meal like this reminds you how good seasonal food tastes and how it is possible to prepare this kind of food at home.

Because Waters has worked for many years delivering her message of eating locally grown, seasonal, organic food, everyone in attendance knew a little something about her. The gathering gave us all the chance to spend some time with this legend and to experience the Waters Effect in person.

Long a devotee of the writer and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol , in 1971 Alice named her new Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, after a Pagnol character. In the forward to the 1986 English translation of Pagnol's My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle, she describes the concept of the restaurant as a way of life:

"My partners and I decided to name our new restaurant after the widower Panisse, a compassionate, placid, and slightly ridiculous marine outfitter in the Marseille trilogy, so as to evoke the sunny good feelings of another world that contained so much that was incomplete or missing in our own—the simple wholesome good food of Provence, the atmosphere of tolerant camaraderie and great lifelong friendships, and a respect for both the old folks and their pleasures and for the young and their passions."

When asked after lunch how she chose the life she leads, Waters began," I was looking for taste. And this led me to the sustainable growers.  We serve 500 people a day at Chez Panisse and we know where everything comes from.  Simply, we support the local farms.

I don't like to compromise around the preciousness of food.  It's a way of life for me."

She described how when she became a mother she realized that the world she had created at Chez Panisse  "couldn't be an island unto ourselves."  She added, "The public school is the only place you can teach every child.  If we can give them an experience that is lasting we change the world."

Ten years ago the students at the Martin Luther King Junior Middle School in Berkeley were eating micro waved food from a shack in the parking lot, which surrounded the school in a hot molten sea of black asphalt.  Working with the principal, Alice created The Edible Schoolyard, a one-acre organic garden and a kitchen classroom with a cafeteria in the works. The Edible Schoolyard program has not only transformed the landscape of the school but has also swept up the children in its revolutionary way of teaching. The journey they are on and the curriculum are beautifully described on their website. A book, The Edible Schoolyard, will soon be available in bookstores.
http://www.edibleschoolyard.org

"We have a responsibility to teach children about what they are eating." Alice continued.  "We need to feed them real food.  Kids need to know what food is doing to the world."

Vote, join the school board, visit the principal, insist on change - use your voice and act, Alice told us.  Many schools are failing; the emphasis on test scores is not saving the school or its children. Inter-curriculum studies introduced through the garden provide a healthier and more successful learning environment.  Plant it, grow it, harvest it, cook it and serve it.  Science, math, English and nutrition are at work in the garden. Using the hands-on learning experience to teach academics opens the child's mind and lets the information in. 

On the four and half-hour drive back to New York, I dozed in the back of our car while Alice and Ham talked about life, daughters and politics.  We arrived home just in time to race upstairs and see the last of the 2008 Presidential Debates between McCain and Obama. 

Needless to say the debate was not nearly as inspiring as a day spent with Alice Waters.  But our hopes were with the theme of change that was the underpinning of the Obama message.  Whether he will be inclined to lend a serious ear to the idea of revolutionizing the public schools through the introduction of gardening and food consciousness will have to wait for another day.  But as this day ended I was still basking in the Waters' Effect, convinced that her ideas could helpfully be applied to global food issues, to the quandary of domestic health and to the crisis of our failing public schools.

SOURCES FOR FURTHER STUDY

www.gainingground.org/ organic farm serving the community

www.ecoliteracy.org/ dedicated to education for sustainable living

www.lunchlessons.org/ changing the way we feed our children a useful site and book
Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children, by Ann Cooper and Lisa Holmes

www.farmtoschool.org/ connects farms to schools, some in Texas

The Edible Schoolyard by Alice Waters, available soon at bookstores

Big Ideas: Linking Food, Culture, Health, and the Environment provides a conceptual framework for integrated learning in these important areas in K-12 classrooms. With a global food crisis, rising environmental concerns, and America's children facing epidemic levels of diet-related diseases, how can educators positively engage students in understanding the connections among these topics?

Films of Marcel Pagnol: The Baker's Wife and Harvest, taken from novels by Jean Giono
Books by Marcel Pagnol: Jean de Florette, Manon of the Springs, The House of My Mother and the Marseille trilogy—Marius, Fanny, and César,

The Farm Stand Marfa newsletter is written and published by Sandra Harper in Marfa, Texas each week during the growing season.  Send comments, inquiries, or requests for free subscriptions to farmstandmarfa at gmail.com.

FARM STAND MARFA
(The market opens at 10 AM every Saturday morning at the farm stand building located on South Highland and the railroad tracks in beautiful downtown Marfa, Texas).

LOCALLY GROWN PRODUCE

MIKE'S Mustard Greens and Collard Greens and assorted peppers

SANDRA'S arugula, chard, heirloom tomatoes and Italian parsley

HOMEMADE FOOD TO GO

PAT'S chicken Italiano soup

MAGDA'S bacon egg and cheese biscuits, breakfast burritos with homemade tortillas,pumpkin empanadas,pumpkin spice cake,and pecan brittle 

BROWN RECLUSE coffee and baked goodies

ALICIA'S breakfast burritos and fried fruit tortilla pies

SOCORRITO'S tamales and a selection of Mexican food

SOCORRO'S old-fashioned pies - key lime, pecan and fruit

JULIE'S homemade jalepeno jelly and fresh salsa

ARTISANS

KATHY'S bolas de Mexico, with percentage of proceeds going to Marfa Meals on Wheels program

COMMUNITY SPIRITS

The Marfa Studio of Arts will be pre-selling wonderful new Christmas cards designed by the Marfa Elementary School students in the SITES (Studio in the Elementary School) Art Program. A set of 16 cards with 4 different images will sell for only $20. See attached photo

The MSA will also be taking orders for Christmas wreaths of fresh local greenery. These wreaths are made by MSA staff, teachers and board members. Two sizes will be available, 10" for $25 and 16" for $35. Get your order in and they will be available at Thanksgiving.

SEE YOU SATURDAY,
SANDRA