Amy Trubek ’85 and her Haverford classmate, Bing Broderick, arrived almost an hour late for a meeting at a central Vermont dairy farm one afternoon in mid-May. Trubek apologized as the pair entered the farmhouse kitchen where bread was baking in an ancient Garland oven and a tub of fresh mint ice cream made from the farm’s milk sat softening on the counter. They had stopped for a quick lunch at a diner on the way, she explained, and the owner sat down to chat with them while they ate.
Dallying over a hamburger and milkshake would not normally be a good excuse, but at the Farmer’s Diner in Barre, the burgers are made from locally raised beef and the shakes are rich with ice cream from the Strafford Organic Creamery where the two had just arrived. Trubek — a chef who has a doctorate in anthropology and recently completed a prestigious two-year Food and Society policy fellowship — has written about the Farmer’s Diner more than once and was eager to introduce the owner, Tod Murphy, to her friend. Broderick has always shared her love of food and took a sabbatical this winter from his career in public television to attend a three-month course at Ballymaloe, the famed Irish cooking school, which also emphasizes regional ingredients.
At the Farmer’s Diner, Murphy’s goal is to offer reasonably priced food made from ingredients that are grown or made within 100 miles of the restaurant. He calls it “food from here.” The first location opened in 2002 and he hopes to expand the concept into clustered groups of similar restaurants. It is a refreshingly populist slant on a culinary movement that has had a gradual but increasing impact on how Americans eat in the 30-plus years since Alice Waters started cooking simple but perfect dishes of the freshest local foods at Chez Panisse, her celebrated Berkeley, California, restaurant. As Trubek wrote in an article for The Boston Globe, “At the Farmer’s Diner, a hamburger isn’t just a hamburger…it’s a story about people who care about the land and love to cook, too.”
It is also a story that Trubek is passionate about telling. Whether she is teaching, writing, cooking, or working in her newest professional role as executive director of the Vermont Fresh Network — a nonprofit that connects the state’s restaurants with farmers and increases awareness of the importance of eating local foods — she radiates appreciation for those who create good food in the field or at the stove. Her academic background in cultural anthropology and her work in the culinary profession contribute to a multifaceted perspective on food. She further expanded her knowledge base during the Kellogg Foundation-funded Food and Society policy fellowship, which included meetings with influential policymakers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and trips to Vancouver, British Columbia, and Costa Rica to study other national food systems. “Amy has an extraordinarily unique perspective,” says Dr. Rachel Johnson, Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Vermont where Trubek has lectured and taught courses on the global food system. “She looks at food and nutrition from the perspective of an artist through her chef’s training, and also as a scientist from her Ph.D. training.”
Although Trubek holds an advanced certificate from the Cordon Bleu in London and taught for seven years at the respected Vermont-based New England Culinary Institute, she is no culinary snob. She fondly recalls her first restaurant job during high school at Dotty Dumpling’s Dowry, a Madison, Wisconsin, restaurant known for great homestyle food made from scratch. She is as comfortable talking technique with a French-trained chef as she is chatting with a home cook about a prized family recipe. Whatever their preferred foods, she simply wants cooks and consumers to be aware that they wield power through where and what they choose to eat. “Whether it’s a hamburger or a confit of duck, whatever people are passionate about will help them see that there are choices other than Burger King or Le Bec Fin,” she says.
Strafford Organic Creamery, to which Trubek and Broderick had driven for a Vermont Fresh Network meeting, offers much to be passionate about — from creamy milk in old-fashioned glass bottles to rich ice cream in flavors like maple that tastes, as Strafford co-owner Amy Huyffer aptly describes it, “like the steam in a sugarhouse during a good boil.” The pair had hoped to arrive at the farm in time to take a brief tour before their meeting, but first they had to taste the new fresh mint ice cream flavor Huyffer had whipped up. It was good, they agreed, but perhaps the crushed mint should be strained out?
They still had time to squeeze in a quick tour of the farm where Huyffer’s husband, Earl Ransom, grew up. Approaching the barn, Huyffer warned that a calf had been stillborn earlier in the day and she was not sure if Earl had had time to move it. He had not, and its quiet body lay nestled in the straw. Through the window of the barn, Huyffer pointed out some of their 40 milkers chewing contentedly. “Those are the girls,” she said, before showing off the milking parlor and gleaming stainless-steel milk tanks fitted with state-of-the-art pasteurization equipment. “I love your milk,” Trubek enthused as the group turned back to the farmhouse. “I bought it because of the glass bottle and because it looked so good.” It is true that the milk actually looks different. Even though it’s pasteurized and homogenized, it is creamy yellow and, in most bottles, a little bit of cream rises to the top. The milk from Guernseys has more milk solids, Huyffer explained, and the butterfat carries more color and flavor. Those black-and-white Holsteins you see all over the hills of Vermont, she said with a grin, are “skim cows.”
Vermont is still largely a rural state and, even around the cities, it’s hard to drive too far without seeing a few cows dotting a field, a big red barn, or an apple orchard lined with old arthritic-limbed trees. Suburban development and Wal-Mart do hover ominously, but most Vermonters value the region’s agricultural heritage and also recognize that critical revenue sources such as tourism depend on the pastoral atmosphere of the state. Although the family-run dairies that have dominated Vermont’s agricultural output for most of the last century have been hit hard by sinking milk prices, Vermont still claims over 1,400 dairy farms, more than triple that of any other New England state. And despite the well-known challenges of the tough Northeastern climate and farming in general, the number of small value-added produce farms and farmstead cheese dairies continues to grow. Acreage of certified organic production has more than doubled in the last five years and Vermont has the largest percentage of farmland devoted to organic vegetables of any state in the country.
While the Vermont Fresh Network cannot take all the credit, it is one of the reasons that the state is considered a relatively supportive place to farm on a smaller and sustainable scale. Founded almost a decade ago by the New England Culinary Institute and the Vermont Department of Agriculture, the organization now has over 120 restaurant members and about 100 farm members. Half Pint Farm is one of the newest — and almost surely one of the smallest — on the network’s farm roster. On just one acre in Burlington, Mara and Spencer Welton are in their second season of harvesting organic baby vegetables and tiny, tender salad shoots called microgreens. “We moved to Vermont because of the embracing of local farmers and local foods,” says Mara Welton. “Vermont Fresh Network was a springboard for us. We knew we wanted to sell to local restaurants and we approached restaurants that were members. We knew they’d give us a chance.”
The Vermont Fresh Network has always worked to get food producers closer to food consumers, to reduce the number of steps between the field and the plate, which allows farmers to take home a larger portion of each food dollar and provides restaurants with fresh, customized ingredients. The organization has gathered momentum each year and serves as a model for others around the country. When Alice Waters spoke at the network’s annual forum last May, she was so impressed with its work along with other innovative agriculture programs in the state, that she asked the assembled crowd, “Why doesn’t the state of Vermont just show us the way?”
As executive director, Trubek will help move the nonprofit forward into its second decade with an expanded focus on consumer communication as well as continued work linking farmers with restaurants. “Amy has the ability to provide strategic leadership and make things happen,” explains Enid Wonnacott, executive director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont and a Vermont Fresh Network board member, “and she has an incredible passion for and knowledge of food. She’s so appreciative and respectful of food providers because she is so moved by food.”
Trubek describes herself half-seriously as “a food-obsessive,” not just because she loves to cook and eat, but also because she believes in the power of food to help people to connect, to respect the earth, to preserve cultural history. “When people know who grows and raises their food, individuals and the community are healthier,” Trubek has written. Not only will the food be fresher, tastier, and most often grown in a more sustainable way, she argues, but supporting local farmers and food producers reemphasizes some of the agrarian values on which this country was founded. While she is careful not to idealize the old days, Trubek does believe we’ve lost something as a culture with the decline of self-supporting communities built around the skills of local craftspeople and interdependent relationships between neighbors. There are both environmental and human benefits to shifting back to local agriculture away from the modern, global food industry in which a red but tasteless tomato is available any time of year thanks to the gasoline that transports it thousands of miles and the often underpaid laborers who cultivate it. “By supporting the craft of farming, you are also celebrating the landscape of America from when it was a craft-based economy and not an industrial one,” she explains.
Trubek recently spent some time back in her childhood hometown of Madison with chef Odessa Piper, another respected champion of cooking with local and seasonal ingredients. At her restaurant, L’Etoile, Piper uses hickory nuts, a Wisconsin tradition that few have time to gather or shell any more. Her winter menu stars an array of root vegetables and the underused Jerusalem artichoke as well as a signature ingredient, apple cider reduced to thick, sticky syrup that becomes the foundation for sauces both sweet and savory. Trubek likes to point out that this general approach is how everyone used to cook, obliged to work creatively with what was around. “Culturally, we have lost so much knowledge about cooking local foods,” she laments.
During Broderick’s recent stay in Vermont with Trubek and her family, the two friends spent quite a few evenings cooking together with local ingredients and revisiting memories of special meals shared through the years. “Whenever Amy and I get together, we cook or talk about food,” says Broderick. Early one evening on the deck behind Trubek’s home near Middlebury, looking out over an apple orchard to the Green Mountains, the friends reflected on how food has been woven throughout their long friendship. At Haverford they had mutual friends, but they didn’t get to know each other well until after college in 1987 when they were both living in London where Trubek attended culinary school and Broderick worked for a study abroad organization. “Amy cooked for me all the time, practicing her recipes for school. We also went out to eat a lot,” Broderick recalled. “We ate fish and chips in newspaper, and we discovered this beautiful old-world Polish place where we ate this beet soup called cholodnik that we loved. When Amy came back to the States, we sent each other letters with cholodnik recipes trying to recreate it.”
Trubek moved on to doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania and then came to Vermont to teach, while Broderick went home to Boston and built a career in the arts, first working at the important roots music label, Rounder Records, and later for WGBH public television. Over the years, they continued to build memories around food. On Nantucket one spring, while Trubek labored over her doctoral thesis on haute cuisine (which was later published in book form to positive reviews in The New Yorker, among others), Broderick recalled, “I would come out and we would cook together. That’s where I learned to make this anadama bread recipe,” he said as he firmly kneaded the sticky dough into shape in his friend’s Vermont kitchen. A few years ago when Trubek was looking for someone to join her in a trek to an unusual Indian restaurant located in a suburban Boston strip mall, she knew her friend would willingly tag along — and he became equally obsessed with the cuisine she had fallen in love with during college studies in southern India.
Broderick never expected to go to cooking school although, he says, “I’ve always enjoyed the ritual of bringing people together for a good meal.” Visiting friends last year in Ireland, where he had first spent a memorable year abroad during college, he saw the Ballymaloe Cooking School Cookbook and he found himself drawn to the words of Darina Allen, the school’s teacher and another internationally recognized advocate for locally rooted cooking. Around the same time, he also read Eric Schlosser’s work, Fast Food Nation, which eerily echoed something he had read in Allen’s book. “Whether we like it or not, we are going to be forced to think about the disastrous consequences of pushing animals and plants further and further beyond their natural limits,” Allen wrote. “It was almost like I was witnessing a dialogue between the two books,” Broderick says.
For 12 weeks at Ballymaloe in County Cork, Broderick cooked every morning under Allen’s watchful eye and then sat through afternoon lectures. “We had fresh milk every day and carrots from a nearby farm that were a pound each, but delicious. We were there when they slaughtered the pig and when the new cows arrived,” he recalls. “Getting everything every day straight from the garden really made me realize how important it was. Darina would take us to the farms, the bakery, the cheesemaker to show us how they did it, so that we really understood every step. It gives you a better sense of the food and how to cook it.” He learned to make puff pastry from scratch, a perfect meringue, and how to correctly salt every dish — the hardest skill to master. “Another big thing I learned at Ballymaloe,” he says, “was to cook and eat with the natural cycle, not trying to break to cycle to suit your own ends. The whole experience made me interested in educating people about food sources.” Broderick had kept Trubek up-to-date via e-mail and, by the time he arrived home, they had arranged for him to come up and work on a short-term project on a series of farmer’s dinners for the Vermont Fresh Network.
The 60 acres of apple trees at Stevens Orchard in Orwell, Vermont, have graced the hills overlooking Lake Champlain for over a century. When Karen Blair and her partner moved from California and bought the orchard in 1997 it had been essentially abandoned for five years. “We were saturated with McIntosh,” she explained to Trubek and Broderick as they walked with her through the trees late one spring afternoon while a chainsaw buzzed nearby. “I was interested in bringing back some of the antique varieties. That’s where the flavor is.” Although she kept many of the older trees, Blair also planted thousands of new trees and now grows 30 different varieties, including Pink Pearl, Golden Russet, and Honeycrisp — apples that never make it onto mainstream supermarket shelves. The Honeycrisps bore their first crop last fall and even months later they still deliver a crisp, juicy bite with a nice hint of tartness.
The neat rows of trees are tended by the same orchard manager who has worked at Stevens Orchard for almost 40 years. There are 100-year-old Northern Spies that could pass for pieces of sculpture, large gray-and-white branches held up by their own suckers trained into triangle supports. Many of the young trees have little flat paper-wrapped packets hanging from their trunks. “Hotel bar soaps,” explained Blair, “to keep the deer away.” She had hoped to farm organically but was quickly disabused of that notion. “The apple experts said, ‘If you wanted to be organic, you should have stayed in California where there’s no humidity and no apple scab,’” she chuckled. The orchard uses integrated pest management techniques, she explained, to reduce the amount of chemicals used.
Stevens Orchard sells apples through two Vermont farmers’ markets and a Massachusetts distributor. “We have tried to sell to local restaurants,” she said to Trubek as they continued to stroll. “I’ve made a lot of calls and given away a lot of apples, but chefs are so busy and a lot of the time we get zero feedback. It’s frustrating.” Blair joined the Vermont Fresh Network this year hoping it would help her develop some customers among local restaurants. “They’re right in the middle of all these apple orchards and they’re using Granny Smiths from across the country,” she said sadly. Trubek nodded sympathetically. “Farmers think that chefs are going to know what to do with their products, and sometimes they need a little help to see the possibilities, to get the conversation going,” she said, “I think we can help.”
The first Vermont Fresh Network farmer’s dinner of the summer took place the following week and demonstrated the delicious results of such farmer-chef conversations. Although it was a special event, the Vermont-focused menu was not unusual for the Simon Pearce Restaurant, a longtime network member located in an old converted mill in the picture-perfect town of Quechee. Farmers, cheesemakers, a butcher, and even a forager shared the meal with regular dinner guests. They ate hors d’oeuvres of Vermont lamb, quail, and rabbit; a salad of locally grown greens crowned with four different cheeses from around the state; grass-fed sirloin from a nearby farm served with foraged leeks and mushrooms; and a final scoop of Strafford’s maple ice cream topped with lacy cookies and a wild ginger-maple-rhubarb sauce.
Tod Murphy of the Farmer’s Diner was there. Tim Taylor of Crossroads Farm — who sits down every January with Simon Pearce executive chef Joshua Duda to plan what he will grow for the restaurant — was there. Amy Huyffer from Strafford Organic Creamery was there, even though she and Earl had been up all night birthing a calf. “It was amazing,” says Broderick, “how in one place you could have people involved in every step of the process - the people who picked the vegetables, brought them to the restaurant, cooked them, and the guests who came to eat them. You rarely get a connection as powerful as that."
It is these types of connections that Trubek will continue to foster. Nothing gives her greater satisfaction than seeing a cook inspired to create comething good to eat from a fine local ingredient and then seeing it eatn with pleasure. Whether it's pancakes and bacon at the Farmre's Diner in Barre or a steak served at Simon Pearce, Trubke concludes, "Food has the ability to change our culture by building relationship between people who care for and nurture food and people who eat food, which is everyone."