Well, yes. And it’s a logical move, if they don’t want to see their legacy (or their democracy) go down the toilet. After all, as Mario Batali once pointed out on CBS Sunday Morning, “When you think about it, all my greatest work is poop, tomorrow.”Ah, but not all excrement is created equal. On the one hand, intensive pork production’s given us vast pools of lethally toxic pig shit known as manure lagoons, more akin to radioactive waste than organic manure. On the other hand, there are worm castings, the highly fertile poop extruded by earthworms that looks like coffee grounds and smells pleasantly earthy.

The respective hazards and merits of various manures has not, historically, been the province of the JBF. This highly influential culinary center, founded after the legendary chef and cookbook author James Beard’s death in 1985 at the age of 81, is better known for its awards honoring outstanding chefs, restaurateurs, and writers.

But with the current American diet in such a dire state, the JBF folks are not content to simply celebrate culinary and literary excellence. Eager to play a more proactive role in reshaping our food system, the JBF has come down squarely in favor of a future that features more worm castings and fewer manure lagoons.

The JBF promoted that vision last week with its second annual JBF Food Conference, How Money and Media Influence the Way America Eats. In conjunction with the conference, the JBF also held its inaugural JBF Leadership Awards [PDF], which honored 10 “visionaries in the business, government and education sectors responsible for creating a healthier, safer, and more sustainable food world.”

Fittingly, one of the honorees was vermicomposting genius Will Allen, whose internationally acclaimed nonprofit Growing Power flourishes on a foundation of worm poop.

And while the JBF’s newfound fervor to reform our food chain may seem like a radical departure, it’s really more like a homecoming. James Beard, whose influence led Julia Child to declare him “the Dean of American Cuisine,” was advocating pure, regional, seasonally based home cooking half a century before Alice Waters and Michael Pollan sought to popularize that ideal.

Beard despised the prepackaged convenience foods that had already begun to displace real meals in his heyday. In a letter to his friend Helen Evans Brown in September of 1954, he wrote:

The food editors’ conference is going full tilt and we hear the results are horrifying. Soon, we are told, there will be no fresh foods on the market — just canned or frozen (this came from the lips of the Secretary of Agriculture).

The JBF Food Conference, co-hosted by Good Housekeeping at their conference facility in the LEED gold certified Hearst Tower, brought together chefs, scholars, entrepreneurs, economists, writers, advocates, and representatives from nonprofits and corporations to examine the financial underpinnings of our food system and the media’s role in shaping our food choices.

The goal was to find common ground among people with diverse agendas, and “establish a set of guiding principles around which we can organize and move forward together,” as the conference’s facilitator, Joseph McIntyre, announced at the outset.

McIntyre, president of the California-based think/do tank Ag Innovations Network, came to town a few days early to make a pilgrimage to Zuccotti Park.

I wanted to go down there and see what was going on. And you know what they were talking about? Money and media. I would argue that our friends in the Tea Party are talking about the same things. Underneath the great debate in America today about food, about finance, underneath the polarized positions between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, lie common aspirations for the future. How many of you do not want a world that’s better for your children?

The JBF’s Leadership Awards, which offer prestige but no monetary prize, personified the paradoxes that bedevil the good food movement. Michelle Obama, Alice Waters, and the aforementioned Will Allen were obvious shoo-ins, as was Fedele Bauccio, whose Bon Appétit Management Company has been the gold standard when it comes to sustainability in the food service industry.

Other honorees whose bona fides were impeccable included Debra Eschmeyer, the dynamic co-founder of the just-launched FoodCorps; the venerable Fred Kirschenmann, of the Leopold Center For Sustainable Agriculture and Stone Barns; and author/professor Janet Poppendieck, whose books Sweet Charity and Free For All: Fixing School Food in America offer thoughtful analyses on the root causes of hunger in our society and how to reform our shoddy school lunch program.

But the inclusion of executives from Costco, Unilever, and Sysco no doubt surprised some folks. Forbes writer Nadia Arumugam was pleased to see them included. She said:

… witnessing three high-level executives from three large corporations receive awards for their tangible and results-driven efforts to further the sustainable food movement, was surprising, but extremely heartening.

This is where the pragmatists and the purists collide. As Naomi Klein told Civil Eats, “The food movement is inherently anti-corporate and it is inherently about rebuilding a real economy.”

In honoring corporations who are making incremental changes that merit our support, the JBF challenges that assumption. And what are we to make of the partnerships that two of the honorees, Michelle Obama and Will Allen, have forged with Walmart?

It’s a dilemma that James Beard would have understood. As David Kamp noted in The United States of Arugula, Beard labeled himself a “gastronomic whore” after entering into an endorsement deal with Green Giant to tout their Corn Niblets and wax beans in his recipes:

In his heart, Beard knew that lending his name to processed foods was a betrayal of his core beliefs in seasonality and regionality … but his cooking school required a lot of money to operate, and his ever-increasing number of writing commitments required a full-time retinue of testers and ghostwriters.

Where does compromise end and co-option begin? As Walt Whitman famously said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Originally posted on Grist

Last week, 200 young farmers gathered at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Tarrytown, NY for a conference with the aim to provide education and support to sprouting farmers. This was the second year of the Young Farmers Conference, filled to capacity and begging the question, will the conference go national next year, or stay local?

The feeling in the air was one of excitement; despite the obstacles, these twenty- and thirty-somethings were eager to better their skills and be a part of the revolution in how we feed ourselves. Workshops included those on composting, poultry processing, creative ideas for accessing land, navigating Farm Bill programs for beginners, soil nutrition, agroforestry and tree crops, farming through the winter, permaculture, bringing meat to market, and more.

As a wannabe farmer-gardener myself, I also learned a lot. Like, for example, that the USDA defines a beginning farmer as someone who has been farming for less than ten years, but who has three years of farm management experience under their belt. Traci Bruckner from the Center for Rural Affairs and Aimee Witteman from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition walked us through a number of programs that beginners are encouraged to apply for, like the Value-Added Producer Grants and Community Food Project Grants.

In another session, Severine von Tscharner Fleming, the leader of the Greenhorns –  an organization that puts on events and provides tools to young farmers — led a talk on seeds. Tom Stearns from High Mowing Seeds, Pete Johnson from Pete’s Greens, and Ken Greene from the Hudson Valley Seed Library discussed the difficulties around starting a seed-based business: the trial testing, erratic income, the need for marketing. All seemed happy, however, to be a part of the movement to reclaim seeds from agribusiness. (This is the best time of year to help these farmers out by buying seeds early, by the way, as they’ve put up capital to produce their catalog and package the product. Seeds make great holiday gifts!)

Rounding out the first day, Wes Jackson gave a talk to the group, whom he referred to as the “refugia,” saying “we need your help!” He spoke about the work he is doing to perennialize wheat and other grain crops at the Land Institute, and added that “human cleverness should be subordinate to nature’s knowledge.” He also spoke about the visit he made with Wendell Berry and Fred Kirschenmann (who also spoke) to Washington, D.C., saying that Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan still haven’t responded to their calls for a 50-year Farm Bill. (The gist of which can be read in their scary op-ed from the New York Times earlier this year).

In another session I attended, the focus was on the ins and outs of land leasing, and yet another featured two farmers, Benjamin Shute and Hector Tejada, discussing the things they’ve learned as farmers with a few years under their belt. There were many sessions I wish I could have taken part but missed… well, there is always next year.

Kirschenmann, President of the board at Stone Barns, focused his talk at the end of the conference on building a “knowledge-intensive agriculture,” and being hopeful. He gave a few pieces of advice: 1. Challenges are always opportunities. 2. There will be plenty of space in the new system for all young farmers who want to farm, no matter how difficult the obstacles seem now, because resource availability will require it. 3. The economy of community will be important moving forward. He said we must work on reducing transaction costs where ever possible, through the spirit of cooperation. He also suggested a book called the Real Wealth of Nations, by Riane Eisler. 4. Civics matter; demand policy changes. 5. And pay attention to the models emerging. Small systems can be very productive, he said, giving the example of Will Allen’s Growing Power, where 10,000 people are fed from 3 acres. (Kirschenmann was also on the Leonard Lopate show last week with two young farmers. You can listen here.)

Surprisingly, there were farmers from much further out than the northeast; I met a young woman who’d been farming in rural Wisconsin, and there were two people who’d come together from a Michigan agriculture school, among others. (I also noticed the crowd was not very diverse, made up of mostly college-educated and white farmers.) This prompted me to ask Nena Johnson, Public Programs Director at Stone Barns, whether or not there were plans in the works for an outreach strategy, to make the Young Farmers Conference a national event. Instead, she told me, the intention was to create a training program so that similar conferences can be held all across the nation using locally based knowledge. One big success according to Johnson: calling on young farmers to design the programming.

The final session I attended, Building the Young Farmers Movement (pictured above), was led by Shute and Fleming. On a sheet of paper, Fleming wrote out all of the problems facing young farmers as we called them out: infrastructure and community building, land access, getting the training you need, building political will, access to healthcare, sustainable finances, and isolation, to name a few. But quickly the page was turned and begun anew: in a full room in the back of Blue Hill restaurant, young farmers began to hatch a plan for staying connected, and discussed coalition building to push for a sustainable farming agenda.

In farmer David “Mas” Masumoto’s latest book, Wisdom of the Last Farmer, he looks back on his agrarian life so far. In it, Masumoto focuses primarily on the things he has learned from his father — the things he wishes he’d paid more attention to (like welding) and the things he chose to do differently once he’d taken over his 80 acre peach, nectarine and grape farm near Fresno, California (like transitioning to organic, and making the tough decision to rip out some very old grape vines in order to preserve and nurture others). Meditating on farm legacies seems to have more meaning just now, when his 23 year old daughter, Nikiko, has decided that she too will continue farming Masumoto peaches.

Wisdom of the Last Farmer contains within it a wealth of experience, which make great lessons for young and beginning farmers. It made sense, then, that Mas and Nikiko Masumoto led a workshop together for young farmers last weekend at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Tarrytown, NY. The workshop gave beginners the opportunity to ask questions of the experienced farmers present, including Stone Barns’ own livestock manager Craig Haney and four-season vegetable grower Jack Algiere. It was also a chance for local apprentice farmers to get to know each other, fostering a sense of farmer community — something Stone Barns hopes to continue building upon. (For more details on Stone Barns, here is a piece I wrote about my visit there last fall, and here is an interview I did then with chef Dan Barber, whose restaurant on the property, Blue Hill, buys much of the farm’s produce.)

Nena Johnson, Public Programs Director for Stone Barns, had this to say:

“Stone Barns Center’s Growing Farmers initiative is meant to fill the gap in technical training that exists for those in our region who are new to farming. Sky-high land prices combined with an aging farmer population have made it all the more difficult for young farmers to receive the traditional knowledge and support that new agriculturalists need to be successful.”

The young farmer focus at Stone Barns really took hold last December during the Young Farmers Conference, a series of workshops and talks to inform newbies about farm skills, acquiring land, and policy issues, giving new farmers the chance to network and even swap seeds. The interest and attendance for the event was more than expected — 171 people took part, and there was even a waiting list of others who wanted to attend. (One of the attendees, Annie Myers, wrote about it for us here) This year, the event will take place again, December 3rd-4th. According to Johnson, workshops will include Beginning Poultry, Introduction to Permaculture, and Financing the Farm among others. But aside from the conference, Stone Barns hopes to continue to support young farmers through workshops like the one with the Masumotos throughout the season.

“In addition to the annual Young Farmers Conference and a robust apprenticeship program,” Johnson said, “the evolving Growing Farmers initiative will also include monthly skills-building workshops and a vibrant online community for participants to network with other young farmers. As the program continues to grow, Stone Barns Center will support and educate our region’s burgeoning population of young farmers working in sustainable agriculture.”

Indeed, the Young Farmers Movement is well underway. (Featuring leaders like Severine Von Tscharner Fleming: check out the new extended trailer for her movie about young farmers, called The Greenhorns, currently in post-production and slated for release at the end of this year). This movement is part of a growing desire in younger people to do something with their lives that has a direct impact on others — feeding people, taking care of the environment, and building community. Farmers have a lot of power to change our future, and young farmers are particularly positioned to start our food system again from scratch, and renew sustainable ways of bringing food to our tables. Groups that support young farmers do so likewise in order to revalue farming as an occupation, and to encourage young people to take on this valuable work. Just looking at the statistics reveals farming to be a dying art — the average age of US farmers is 55 years old. But the tide is changing, Masumoto said on the Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio on Monday. “People from non-farming backgrounds are gravitating towards agriculture, and I see that as renewal.” He characterized these new farmers as a part of “a whole generation interested in food, cooking and also how to grow food.”

And to all of our loyal young farmer readers out there who may or may not be able to make it out to Stone Barns for these workshops, you can still benefit from Mas Masumoto’s farm wisdom. Three young farmers who email us at contest (at) civileats.com and tell us 1) where and what you farm 2) why you became a farmer and what keeps you going, and 3) what you would like to read about in our Young Farmer’s Series (issues big and small, questions you have, resources explained) will receive a free copy of Mas Masumoto’s Wisdom of the Last Farmer, courtesy of Free Press and Civil Eats! This contest will run through next week, and we will announce the winners on Monday, August 24th.

There are few moments more powerful and thrilling for a young person than those in which we learn a skill that we want to and will use for the rest of our lives.  Or those first days when we truly realistically consider our futures – just our next five years, if not more – and realize (or think very much) that we know what it is that will make us happy.  Or that last second we have before feeling we are in that future, that brief moment of conviction that we have never in our lives been less prepared nor more determined.

The Young Farmers Conference last weekend, at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, ran the participants on a marathon of such moments.  There were the inspiring speeches and the valuable networking one expects at a conference, and the beautiful meals one expects at Stone Barns, but mainly it was a time to take notes, to ask questions, to observe, and to listen.  Not only were we inspired, we were productive.

We learned how to begin doing many things: raising chickens, breeding swine, growing vegetables in a greenhouse.  We were told how to find land, how to write a business plan for a farm, how to dress up our products so they sell well at market. Many of us who came to this conference were not farmers.  And most of us have so much to learn about farming that we might have seemed comical to the more experienced.  But the presenters – the farmers, growers, breeders, foresters – brought their skills down to our level, to square one, and shared an immense amount of knowledge in hardly eight hours of workshops.

Four-Season Growing. Jack taught us how to calculate the finances of a greenhouse, to know the value of each square foot of soil.  He described the family rotations – six families, each including several varieties of plants – and the number of days it takes for arugula to grow in summer versus winter.  He taught us how he uses the row covers, from what material, at what time of day.  He told us what the temperature should be for certain levels of productivity, what sort of heaters he uses, and how their release of CO₂ at dawn catalyzes photosynthesis in that brief, coldest, last moment of the night.  He told us exactly how much money he’d spent on propane, using box heaters vs. air heaters.  He told us how long to wait for the first cut of greens, the babies, and for the second cut, a profitable premium product.  He told us of the compost system and the prop house, the soil and the seeds.  He told us how surely one keeps loyal customers with a 365-day growing season.

Beginning Poultry.  Craig told us what to look for in a hatchery, what to expect in the box when the chicks arrive at the post office, not to go grocery shopping and forget that our box of chicks is in the back of our car.  He taught us how to set up the brooding pen, how the chicks slip on newspaper, how to build the space to keep out rats and raccoons.  He told us what to consider when buying meat chickens (taste, consumer demand, growth-time, cost of production), and showed us the advantages of certain pens, fences, and pastures.  He was clear about why he would choose one bird or feed or pen or another, often simply explaining his personal preference.  “I use the term Animal Husbandry intentionally,” he said, “because this IS a marriage, of sorts.  You really have to like your animals – how they look, and act, and treat you.  You have to get to know them, and like living with them.”

Slaughterhouse Initiative. Judy explained her position at the head of Glynwood Center, a conference center and working farm that has identified a problem in the lack of slaughterhouses in and around Putnam County.  She presented the mobile slaughterhouse project, and spoke of the bureaucracy such a project faces, the services it would provide, and the demonstrable demand for these services she has found among her community.  The conversation jockeyed from urban farmer to historian to farmer-educator to friend-of-a-butcher; from accusations of bureaucratic pandering to business plan proposals, from reminders of top-hat butchers in early American markets to a polemic on the seismic shift in mentality that must take place before slaughterhouses and butcher shops are ever expected to produce anything of high quality.  We learned that we have a lot to learn about meat.

My general expectations for the conference were that it would confirm my dislike of the wealthy nature of Stone Barns, that I would meet few true farmers and more farmer wannabes (like myself), and that it would be like most conferences, where energy is high, productivity is low, and the conversations between workshops are the most valuable part of the experience.  Those conversations were valuable, but so were the workshops, and so was the energy, and so was the adjustment of my view of Stone Barns.  However the farm-restaurant handles it’s finances, the people who run the farm are full of a knowledge that young people need, and at least for two days, were wonderfully willing and able to teach it.

I remember first meeting The Greenhorns’ Severine, in Berkeley this Spring, when she (was figuring out how I might be useful to her, and) rather bluntly asked what I knew how to do.  I sheepishly said I could write decently, and I could organize people and run meetings.  She interrupted me within seconds: You have to treat your life like a toolbelt!  Start filling it up with tools!  You have to learn how to do things!  Two days at a conference might not count for much, but for many of us, it was a time to first touch the tools we wish to acquire, and a joyous early step towards making our lives full.

Download a full list of the conference workshops and presenters here.

Normally I don’t like soft-boiled eggs.  But there I was, sitting at Blue Hill restaurant at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Tarrytown, New York, with a plate of delicately cooked spinach in a savory sauce crowned with a battered, soft-boiled egg and enjoying every last bite.  That is because chef Dan Barber is out to refocus our attention on the spoils of the farm right outside: an 80 acre four-season and pastured livestock farm that grows and raises most of the food served on the premises.  Watching chickens scratch around on pasture, and then enjoying their eggs elegantly prepared is transparency you can taste.

I have to admit that when I arrived here, I figured that a restaurant with a James Beard Award-winning chef on a Rockefeller estate could only be exclusive.  But I found the exact opposite was true: In choosing to build a community through public programs and farm to table relationships, this restaurant is leading us to new ideas about the future food system in the making.

Barber described a visit to Stone Barns like a Disneyland experience for food, and talked about how it can serve as a model for individual change.  “It depends on where you live and what your passion is,” he said, “but essentially you [can] take the experience here, and try to replicate it in your everyday life.  And that could just be eating healthier, or engaging in some kind of agriculture, [or knowing] where your food is coming from.”

At Blue Hill, chefs literally wander out into the fields, pick their own vegetables and herbs, and then toss them into the pan.  The only option on the menu, the “Farmer’s Feast,” is served in courses, so that vegetables can take on the starring role without regular meat eaters leaving feeling hungry. “I feel like I’m doing what we’ve always done,” Barber said, “which is to try to have the work of these farmers be as exemplified as possible.”

The farm grows 35 types of lettuce alone, and provides two-thirds of the produce used in the restaurant.  At the peak of the season (now), they serve 80% of their food from right outside.

I took a tour of Stone Barns’ grounds before my dinner reservation at the restaurant.  The landscape could only be described as idealistic because its pastoral imagery evokes our common vision of farms (sheep, turkeys and geese at pasture, pigs nosing around for acorns in the woods, inter-cropped vegetables in vibrant rows), even though only a small percentage of farms still operate in this way.

While the farm inspires thoughts of the past, the focus is on artisan approaches mixed with useful technology, like movable electric fencing and a 22,000 square foot greenhouse that maintains its temperature in all seasons.  But new-fangled devices shouldn’t replace good farming practices, according to Jack Algiere, the four-season farm manager, who added a less expensive wood and plastic greenhouse to prove that pricey technology isn’t necessary to produce quality, pesticide-free food.

Compost is the magic ingredient in growing flavorful produce.  Made from leaves, grass clippings, livestock manure and hay, and the restaurant’s kitchen scraps, it is also sold locally at Whole Foods as a source of revenue for the farm.  This dense fertilizer is a natural byproduct of a healthy growing system, and is essential for supporting soil health and by extension, nutrient-rich food.

In the dining room, I’d traded my muddy converse for heels.  I sat as plates of pickled kabocha squash, pea blossoms, beet and root vegetable chips, as well as crisp, lightly seasoned beans arrived while we sipped a local sparkling wine from Long Island.  The perfectly petite courses kept arriving – like the tomato soup with almond, a taste of quinoa and fennel in a Greek style vinegar sauce with capers and tomatoes, and a small serving of blue fish with seckel pear and soybeans.

Tasting the bounty of the season as a diner was thrilling, but the staff seemed just as engaged in the food as I was.  Visual aids were presented just before they were served: the three types of beets they grow before a mache salad with beets and a frothy yogurt dressing, and three giant mushrooms foraged on the farm or nearby before the squash gnocchi with matsutake and maitake mushrooms.  What better way to end a meal than with a tisane from the last of the garden outside the kitchen door, which our waiter had saved from frost and placed in pots, and wheeled out to us on a tray.  He then clipped various sages for our teapots, which we poured into cups along with Stone Barns’ local honey.

When David Rockefeller and his daughter Peggy Dulany were looking to find a way to preserve these stone buildings that used to house the family’s dairy, and allow them to serve the public, it was Barber along with his brother David and his brother’s wife Laureen who contributed to the vision of Stone Barns as it stands today.  The idea was to begin to rebuild the local food system we’ve lost in the last three decades.  “The most provocative changes are going to come from the economics of the way our food is grown,” said Dan Barber.  “Smaller, regional food systems are going to end up being price competitive with the big food chain, because the big food chain can actually not survive at $100 a barrel for oil and up… When you get to the economics of cheap food literally not being cheap anymore, I think that’s going to be the most powerful force for change.”

Where the foodies go, so hopefully, eventually, goes the country too.

Read my full interview with Dan Barber here.

Photo: Chickens at Stone Barns, and Greenhouse, by Yann Mabille

I spoke with Dan Barber last week about his restaurant Blue Hill, located at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, an 80 acre four-season and pastured livestock farm in Tarrytown, New York that provides most of the food for the restaurant and conducts educational programs open to the public.  I wrote about my experience at Stone Barns and the restaurant here.

Civil Eats: Do you see Stone Barns as a model for how we need to start thinking about local food systems? Is it replicable, can people do similar things without the kind of funding you’ve had?

Dan Barber:  I do think that the sort of underpinnings of the philosophy of the place, which is to say the connections between a farm a restaurant and some type of educational entity, can be replicated anywhere.  Would Stone Barns look different in North Dakota? Would it look different in Texas, and even in Berkeley? Yes.  I just gave this example last week at a talk, take Topeka, Kansas [if] you had a chef who was interested in serving grass-fed steaks, and he contacted a rancher, who up until that point had sent all of his cattle to be finished at feedlots, and he says to the rancher I am going to buy every year five head.  Could you separate those out and finish them on grass?  And maybe the farmer has read Michael Pollan and said wow, I’d really like to try this.  So they enter into this sort of handshake agreement or they write up a contract, a five head are set aside.  So then the day comes when the meat is delivered to the restaurant, but the chef he uses the steaks for the restaurant but he realizes very quickly that he has a tremendous amount of hamburger meat on his hands.  And since his restaurant doesn’t use hamburger meat, he thinks about his daughter who is in a private school in Topeka, so he goes to the principal, and explains the situation, and says let’s remove conventional hamburger from the cafeteria, and let’s do grass fed hamburger and the principal, who might have also read Michael Pollan, would say great, the school will find a way to pay a little bit extra for this, and not only that but we’re going to advertise some of those costs and the intellectual potential throughout the curriculum.  So we’re going to talk to the biology teacher about what we’re doing, we’re going to talk to the social science teacher about what we’re doing, and that becomes not just giving the kids better meat in the cafeteria, it becomes a lesson explaining the history and the science and the thinking behind this stuff in their curriculum.  So all of a sudden in that little example, with by the way, absolutely no capital investment, just this handshake between the farmer, the chef and the principal, you’ve got the same philosophical framework as you do at Stone Barns.  Hopefully the people that come here see that underpinning, and that’s what I try to talk about a lot, and see how we can get other people looking at a shortened food chain in sort of the same way.

CE: So that is the vision…

DB:  Another way to look at how it is replicable, or how it can inspire other people is you come here, and spend the day walking the farm or taking a class or doing both and then having dinner, and you have such a great day, in the same kind of mindset of like going to Disneyland, you leave and you say, wow my kids had such a great time, and we ate such delicious food, I’d like to replicate that experience.  It depends on where you live and what your passion is, but essentially you take the experience here, and you try to replicate it in your everyday life.  And that could just be eating healthier, or engaging in some kind of agriculture, [knowing] where your food is coming from, but that experience seems to me to hopefully inspire other people to have a similar kind of food experience.

CE: So can I assume that you are optimistic about where our food system is going?

DB: Well, that depends.  I mean I see a lot of really amazing things… I look at it a little bit historically just in the sense that like you and might not have been having this conversation ten years ago but when I opened up Blue Hill New York [with my brother David and his wife Laureen], it was very difficult to talk about these issues and frame them in a way that people saw the connections between food and the way the world is used.   I think that because of people like you and Michael Pollan and all the other people who’ve been writing about and talking about this that it makes the job of chefs like me a lot easier, and Stone Barns came around at a good time, it was a fortunate and tipping point time where it seems like people’s consciousness around these issues are only a level that I’ve never experienced before.  So in that sense I feel optimistic.  And you know I guess it’s hard to do any of this work and not be a little bit optimistic, otherwise you wouldn’t be working so hard towards it.  The old food chain, that is so established in this country, its at the point where there’s going to be huge changes forced upon it, and I don’t know how much of that is going to come from public consciousness although we’ve seen such a dramatic change in the last few years so anything is possible but I think the most provocative changes are going to come from the economics of the way our food is grown.  The dependence on fossil fuels of the food system and how that is going to be threatened moving forward, this reliance on this very cheap oil to produce food and to transport food and to process food that is all in grave threat.  I think there is going to be an increasing price parity between the kind of foods that represents what Stone Barns is doing and its the smaller, regional food systems that are going to end up being price competitive with the big food chain, because the big food chain can actually not survive at $100 a barrel for oil and up.  You know that’s all very philosophical, and right, but to the mind set of somebody who only has a certain amount of money to spend for food its hard to swallow, but when you get to the economics of cheap food literally not being cheap anymore, I think that’s going to be the most powerful force for change.

CE:  Michael Pollan’s article in the recent Times Magazine Food Issue brought a lot of attention to that issue, and we could have a president in the White House who is actually paying attention.

DB:  I hope that whoever is there is going to confront this in ways these past couple presidents have not.

CE:  I could not help but notice in your restaurant that you do focus more on vegetables, which is not very common for fine dining in New York.  I was just wondering if you found it difficult to make that transition, not so much for yourself but for your clientele, and what kind of response that you’ve had?

DB:  In a multi-course menu I think you have a little bit more freedom to have the vegetables play a starring role.  So in that sense it shows off the work of Jack [Algiere, the four-season farm manager], and what he is doing with the greenhouse and with the field.

CE: But do you feel like you are re-educating your diners, because I know there is a big conversation, you know Mark Bittman put out How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and in the beginning he says “I’m not a vegetarian, and I don’t advocate for vegetarianism, but I really think we need to start thinking about putting meat on the side of the dish and not in the center of the dish,” and Michael Pollan has said the same thing.  So do you feel kind of like you are following that philosophy?

DB:  I feel like I’m doing what we’ve always done, which is to try to have the work of these farmers be as exemplified as possible, so you can do that in a variety of ways.  I like the idea of through a multi-course tasting experience you end up getting these vegetables to play the starring role they probably should play.  As for meat, it’s easier for me to put meat on the side, or in other words, have less protein in the course of a multi-course meal.  But if you’re in the restaurant business and you’re trying to do less meat and stay in business, it’s really hard on a sort of a la carte menu.

CE:  Do you think that most of your clientele goes to visit the farm, that they have a connection to the farm itself?

DB:  My sense is that people who don’t actually physically walk around, or talk to a farmer or do a program at Stone Barns have this sort of unconscious connection when they are sitting in the dining room, especially in the spring and summer when it stays light so late, or even the walk from your car, or the drive in, if you come here when it’s light out you do see some kind of agriculture, and much of the year, when you are eating your meal you are looking out at agriculture.  This was part of the point of this project, we were very aware of where we were putting the dining room and where your site lines were going.  You know, if there is a person that has no interest in the issues we just talked about, its still kind of hard to come into this restaurant and not feel some kind of connection to agriculture, and to what you’re eating and what’s going on outdoors.  So I’m okay with people who have no interest in walking around because they’re going to get it anyway.

CE: through the presentation of the beets and the mushrooms…

DB: Yeah, well this time of year we do a lot more of that, because I know people aren’t walking around, they aren’t seeing things and that’s a way of bringing the farm out to the table.

Photo: Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture by Yann Mabille