Summer 2010
Food Is Hip
By Melissa Pasanen
Photographed by Daria Bishop
Like jazz in the '50s, politics in the '60s or journalism in the '70s, food has become today’s “now” field of endeavor — a place to challenge assumptions, shake up the status quo, get creative and make your mark. Valuing artisan over corporate, local over national, funky over bland, the new food culture is hip, smart, idealistic — and a perfect fit for Vermont.
Across the state, a wave of young and mid-career Vermonters are embracing the emerging food aesthetic, creating new social connections, starting new businesses, taking chances and inventing new ways of doing things. Building on the state’s rich agricultural history and decades-old environmental awareness, they contribute to our growing reputation for high-caliber, organic, locally grown food, much of it served with a side of social responsibility.
The eight 20-, 30- and 40-somethings profiled here represent varying aspects of Vermont’s new-school food scene, from restaurateurs and farmers to food scientists and food-access advocates. Different callings, but similar passion drives these Vermonters, who believe in the power of food — and aren’t too cool to roll up their sleeves and work at it.
Ariel Zevon, 33, Barre
Founder and executive director, Local Agricultural Community Exchange, Owner, Farm Fresh Market and Café
“Thank you for being here,” says a small sign stuck into a Napa cabbage, one of many welcoming gestures at Farm Fresh Market and Café in Barre. The Main Street market and its sister nonprofit, Local Agricultural Community Exchange (LACE), are just a little younger than founder Ariel Zevon’s 7-year-old twins — and as full of energy. On any given day in the spacious former Homer Fitts department store, parents and grandparents connect over coffee and freshly made egg sandwiches while preschoolers bang on xylophones in the play area; kids troop over from the CityScape afterschool program for hands-on cooking classes; farmers mingle with neighbors at a family-style harvest supper; and entrepreneurs press together Polish pierogies or Pakistani dumplings in the commercial kitchen.
Zevon, daughter of late musician Warren Zevon, graduated from Marlboro College and returned to Vermont from Los Angeles in 2004. “I always said when I had kids I’d come back,” she says, “and I always intended to get into farming and growing my own food.” Zevon volunteered on farms, became a master gardener and started “scheming,” she says, to fill a gap in her hometown: a year-round place where Barre residents could get locally grown food. “It’s about reconnecting community with local farms to celebrate local food,” she explains. “It strengthens our physical, economic and spiritual health.”
Funded through a patchwork of business loans, a home-equity loan and benefit concerts by Zevon’s godfather, Jackson Browne, the café/store and nonprofit launched in 2006 and received a major USDA grant last year. From the start, Zevon has worked closely with partners like Central Vermont Community Action Council to reach as many area residents as possible. Everyone is welcome — from seniors undertaking re-employment training to young residents from a nearby transitional housing program who cook for the café’s Friday night Bad Boy Bistro. “While they’re scrubbing beets from a farm an hour away, they’re building skills, self-respect and appreciation for local foods,” Zevon explains. “It’s the mission at work,” she says.
“Ariel has opened her establishment and her heart to the people we serve,” says Kim Daniels of PRIDE, an organization that helps those with traumatic brain injuries. “She always finds something they can do well and it’s real and it’s valued. She’s brought Main Street and community back to town.”
Heather Darby, Ph.D. , 35, Alburg , Agronomist, University of Vermont Cooperative Extension, Farmer
Heather Darby jokes about coming from a line of Alburg “land barons” and shows off yellowed photos of her grandfather holding his horse team and her great-grandfather with his beehives. Darby recalls that when she was growing up on the dairy farm, there were 15 or 20 other farmers around. “People helped each other and cared about each other,” she says. “It was heartbreaking to watch them all go out of business, one after the other.”
Darby considered becoming a lawyer to help, but her seventh-generation farming blood led her to agronomy, the science of crop production. While completing her doctorate at Oregon State, she saw an ad for an extension agronomist position in St. Albans and reluctantly applied. “I knew what I was coming back to was a challenge,” she says of her own family’s struggling farm. “And then there were expectations of the farmers, of people in town, of family.”
Seven years later, Darby manages a research and applied science team of four supported by grants of more than $1 million. Its focus is “the three B’s: bread, biofuel and beer,” she explains, along with forage crops and issues like soil erosion and water quality. Darby works with hundreds of farmers as well as brewers, bakers and tofu-makers. “It’s humbling. Very rarely do I have all the answers,” she says. “That’s why we started research. It’s about where we want to go and how we’re going to get there together.”
Standing on the farm Darby and her husband bought from her parents, she reflects, “My destiny — some people have destinies, I guess — was to come back. In some ways it’s an obligation, but this was what I wanted. I love farming and agriculture and soil and what it means to the community.”
At a neighboring farm, which once belonged to Darby’s great-great-grandfather and now hosts her research, she scoops up a handful of soil. “Oh man, it does smell good,” she exclaims. “It’s crazy how much I love it. I could almost eat it.” Farmer and extension board member Roger Rainville beams as he watches her. “Her Ph.D. got her the job, but that’s not what’s keeping her in the job. She has it in her heart,” he says. “She’s more than lived up to expectations — and I had high expectations.”
Earl Ransom & Amy Huyffer, 36 & 40, Strafford, Farmers and owners, Strafford Organic Creamery
Their ice cream has been called “exquisite” in Food & Wine, a “favorite” by The New York Times and “wonderfully full-flavored” in The Atlantic Monthly, but you could hang out for days with Earl Ransom and Amy Huyffer and they wouldn’t mention any of that.
Partly it’s because the husband and wife team is a little busy juggling the needs of 50 milkers plus heifers, a flock of meat chickens and layers, a large vegetable garden and the plant where they bottle their milk and churn their ice cream — pausing periodically to find a lost toy or hug one of their four young sons. But mostly it’s because they believe their products speak for themselves.
The couple operates Strafford Organic Creamery out of Rockbottom Farm where Ransom spent most of his childhood. He returned from college in the Midwest and, in 1998, met Huyffer across the bar she was tending to support herself through Vermont Law School. In 2001, frustrated by the second sale of the regional organic brand that had been buying the family farm’s milk, they decided to launch their own line with help from Ransom’s brothers and a cousin. “We were young and stupid,” Ransom jokes. “We were newlyweds. We thought we could do anything,” his wife clarifies.
The learning curve was steep, recalls Byron Moyer, retired Agency of Agriculture dairy chief, but the result was worth it. “It’s extremely important to the dairy industry that we have these high-end products out there,” Moyer says. “It helps distinguish Vermont dairy in general.”
Nine years later, the couple still milks a mostly Guernsey herd with names like Nefertiti and Jasmine, whose high-protein, high-fat, butter-yellow milk and cream they still bottle to order in glass bottles for some three dozen Vermont and New Hampshire accounts. (“Asking why you like Guernseys is like asking why you like sunshine,” Huyffer says.) They still sweeten their maple ice cream with only maple syrup and never add stabilizers, though ice cream experts predicted failure on both counts. And their marketing budget is still less than $100 — if you don’t count the gallons of ice cream they donate annually to statewide farm and food events.
“They always arrive with 10 scoops, kids and babies on their backs, and all that ice cream,” says Enid Wonnacott, executive director of Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont. “They are unique, innovative farmers, and so caring. It’s neat when food creates community.”
India Burnett Farmerl, 28, Rutland Region , Co-founder and program director, Rutland Area Farm and Food Link, Farmer
The Rutland region has faced more than its share of challenges. “We lost manufacturing, the marble quarry, the railroad — and we didn’t get the highway,” explains Greg Cox, a West Rutland farmer for 30 years. “People like living here because of the open land, the farms, the culture — but it’s going rapidly.” Luckily for Rutland, it also has creative, committed residents like India Burnett Farmer who co-founded Rutland Area Farm and Food Link (RAFFL) six years ago.
It was while working on economic development initiatives as a planner for the Rutland Regional Planning Commission that Burnett Farmer, a Green Mountain College graduate, first dug deeply into the state of regional agriculture. “There was this general melancholy about farming in Rutland. There wasn’t a lot of celebration around agriculture that was viable, and there were a lot of very real challenges,” recalls Burnett Farmer. “We did find there were some easy things that could be done to help,” she says, “but there was no organization to do them.” So in 2004, she left her job to bootstrap a new organization into being. “You want people like India in your community,” says Cox, a longtime RAFFL board member.
RAFFL is about supporting and forging connections: between farmers and consumers, farmers and resources, food and health, agriculture and culture. “We’ve been able to identify challenges and develop strategies and also get people energized around what is good and is working,” says Burnett Farmer.
The organization published its fifth annual Locally Grown Guide, helped establish the state’s first year-round weekly farmers market and has facilitated sales between farms and institutions. It is cultivating the next generation of farmers through mixers and a grant-funded New Farmer Initiative, which offers business advice and is developing an incubator farm. RAFFL has also undertaken a feasibility study for a Green Mountain Food Hub — shared processing, storage and distribution facilities where farmers will be able to develop value-added products for customers like schools.
“My hope is that the work we’re doing can keep land accessible and cultivate markets that truly value the products and the land,” says Burnett Farmer, who also practices what she preaches. Last year she and her husband bought 190 acres in West Pawlet to expand their nursery of cold-tolerant grape varieties. Fourth-generation Pawlet farmer Bill Clark is optimistic about new farms like theirs and the work of RAFFL. “We’re trying to turn some things around here,” says Clark, “and RAFFL is what turns the wheels.”
Ben Trevits & Cavan Meese, 30 & 32, West Glover, Co-owners, The Parker Pie Co.
“So our friend Phil Young buys the general store in West Glover because no one else will,” recounts Ben Trevits. “Then Cavan comes up with this crazy idea: Let’s make a pizza place. He does the legwork, gets some financing. He develops the sauce and the dough, gets some really good beer. People were freaking out about the place. It was awesome, but back then I was just a customer and still thinking he was crazy being in the middle of nowhere.”
Trevits and Cavan Meese grew up together in the Northeast Kingdom village, appreciating their hometown but also grumbling about it as young people often do. “There is a rich culture,” reflects Meese, “but teenagers around here have nothing to do but get in trouble.” Sometimes while they were hanging out, they’d imagine a place everyone could gather over food and drink, maybe music, but then Trevits left for culinary school and Meese became a theatrical lighting designer.
Still, West Glover was always home and their friend’s purchase of the Lake Parker Country Store — the heart of the village since the late 1800s — prompted a revisit of that youthful dream. “If you got rid of the store, there was nothing in the village. No community,” Meese says. A serious motorcycle accident led Trevits to take a break from cooking, so Meese opened in 2004 without him, but a year later they were working together. Unexpected kudos from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rachael Ray and the notoriously particular Art of Eating quarterly followed, and they were soon bursting at the seams. “I’m a pizza fanatic,” Meese admits. “I was just trying to make the pizza I really like: cooked on stone with a hand-tossed, relatively thin and foldable crust.”
Young recently sold the building to a group of locals, one of whom, builder Keone Maher, has been leading the renovation of the property’s barn into more seating and a performance space. In the meantime, Parker Pie has doubled the size of its original kitchen and expanded to breakfast, Wednesday-night pasta, and Thursday tapas and music to benefit the regional high school’s music program. “This is a happening spot,” Maher says. “Everybody felt a bit of ownership of the place. The neighborhood just decided to do it together.”
“We’re just trying to be a little spark that ignites something good,” Meese says. “We can all agree on pizza. That’s our common ground.”
Theresa Snow, 31, Morrisville, Program director of agricultural resources, Vermont Foodbank
In the Vermont Foodbank’s Wolcott distribution center, pallets are stacked high with bags of rice and canned vegetables, staples for food shelves and other agencies that receive food through the Foodbank, which they in turn provide to the needy. But in a large walk-in cooler, Theresa Snow shows off a newer development: tubs of fresh greens and crates of sun-yellow summer squash salvaged from local farms through the Foodbank’s gleaning program, an outgrowth of a project she started in 2004.
The endeavor, originally named Salvation Farms, started small with Pete’s Greens in Craftsbury where Snow, then a recent Sterling College graduate, had worked. “Pete had extra greens and we thought, 'Let’s get this food to people who aren’t buying it,’” Snow recalls. She delivered some to nearby senior and day care centers and called the Foodbank, which happily took the rest. The project quickly expanded to other farms that were eager to donate excess produce but did not have the staff to glean it or to train volunteers.
For three years, Salvation Farms served the Lamoille Valley under the financial sponsorship of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont. Snow involved dozens of gleaners from preschoolers to seniors, college students to at-risk youth because she believes the community should share in harvesting and learn how food is grown, lessons she treasures from her Morrisville childhood helping in her family’s garden and on her grandparents’ farm. “We wanted to reconnect people with what it means to provide for yourself,” Snow explains.
By January 2008, the project was so successful and Snow stretched so thin, that she and her advisory board decided to take the Foodbank up on its offer of a permanent home. Doug O’Brien, then Foodbank CEO, says Snow’s efforts dovetailed perfectly with their goal to provide more fresh, locally grown food. “Theresa was doing the right thing at the right time,” he says. “It was an incredible accomplishment how far she’d gotten with so few resources.”
The Foodbank gleaning program now has field representatives in Brattleboro and Wolcott and rescued 400,000 pounds of produce last year from triple the number of farms as two years ago. Unfortunately, need for emergency food continues to grow in Vermont. The USDA reports that the number of Vermonters at greatest risk of hunger has increased significantly over the past decade. All the more reason not to leave any apple unpicked. “Food is for everybody and farmers want to feed everybody,” Snow says.
