The Quest for What Sustains Us

Food brings us together and—when survival instincts or clashing mores or cultures dictate—food can come between us. What we consume is closely allied to identity as well as health: You are what you eat, the adage goes.

Traditional Chinese consider food in terms of yin and yang. From tomb-paintings, we know that ancient Egyptians prized figs, fish and cucumbers. During the Roman Empire, the senatorial class ate elaborate meals, in a reclining position and using their hands, washing the meal down with wine. Food, as much as love, is an ancient and international language, spoken with many accents.

For some, the quest for food purity rivals the highest levels of religious fervor. For others, food represents good taste or certain values. Some seek food only to stave off hunger. For these Milton graduates, food and its frequent companion, wine, are more than the source of energy and vitality; they are what sustains us.

Ian Cheney ’98
What’s wrong with how America thinks of food?

Until this year, Ian Cheney ’98 had never killed a deer. Why would he? Ian grew up in Milton, Massachusetts—not exactly a headquarters for hunters—and earned a master’s in environmental science from Yale, where he urged dining services to prepare locally produced, more healthful food. (Later, food maven Alice Waters added momentum to that movement at Yale.)

Ian began considering shooting a deer because, he says, Americans are out of touch with the connection between food and nature. Eating food, he thinks, is an essentially sensual experience as fundamental to life as sleep and sex. Ian has been focused on food and its relationship to the people of our country—food-safety scares and the obesity epidemic, for example. Corn, Ian believes, is the center of America’s food system.

“Corn is essential to the kingdom of fast food that has come to dominate much of the American foodscape,” Ian says. “Corn fast-fattens livestock in confined feeding operations, sweetens millions of soft drinks as high fructose corn syrup, and transforms itself into thousands of different processed foods—it is all but unrecognizable in the supermarket, but without corn the food system would be a very different place.”

With co-producer and Yale classmate Curt Ellis, director of photography Sam Cullman and award-winning director Aaron Woolf (who visited Milton as a Melissa Dilworth Gold visiting artist in 2002), Ian is producing King Corn, a film that goes beyond the heft of Supersize Me to examine America’s evolving and often ironic relationship with food.

“We launched this project thinking that something was wrong with how America thinks about food. In the 19th century, the majority of people helped produce their own food, but now most people don’t know where our food comes from,” he says, noting that an average bite of food travels 1,300 miles before it’s eaten.

One acre of corn yields 10,000 pounds. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the annual per capita corn consumption has soared from 15.4 pounds in the 1950s to 28.4 pounds in 2000. In Iowa, where both Ian and Curt can trace great-grandfathers, the filmmakers set out to follow a kernel through the food system.

The film begins with their planting an acre of corn in northeastern Iowa. “The acre of corn—which must eventually be sold—becomes a ticket into the world between farm and plate,” the filmmakers assert on their Web site. Film segments jump from the acre in Iowa to grain elevators, diners, gene laboratories and corporate boardrooms.

The ripening of the corn drives the film’s narrative. It explores how our culture, economy and political system shape our landscapes, our communities and—by making certain types of food cheaper and more accessible—our bodies.

We consume the industrial or “dent” corn in products such as ketchup and hamburger (that comes from corn-fed cows) and in virtually every processed food. An irony is that farmers who grow this corn are unable to feed themselves by farming; the corn is basically inedible in its original state. The government subsidizes industrial corn farming; therefore farmers grow it regardless of demand—and the demand stays strong because the cost is low.

Before the corn becomes the corn syrup in soda, it is planted and fertilized, and protected from predators. It must survive to feed the masses.

Yet as Ian and his colleagues found, the journey from the dark soil to an American table is filled with irony: A friend sent Ian heavy-duty gardening gloves, not realizing that farmers of large-scale operations have little cause to touch the earth. “I didn’t get much exercise as a farmer, either,” Ian admits.

In addition to planting their own acre of industrial corn, Ian and his Mosaic Films, Inc. colleagues talked with authors and activists. Eager to expand the debate about food, they also spoke to ranchers, lobbyists, restaurateurs, food warehousers and shrimp fishermen. They looked at corn as a concept, a commodity and a catalyst for changing the American diet. According to the trailer for King Corn, corn is the most powerful food crop the world has ever known, and it has allowed America to feed more people for less money than ever before.

Ian warns about a two-class food system emerging: People with means are thinking carefully about what they eat, while others get access to more and more processed—but affordable—food. Ian started the project with bias about issues such as pesticides and the ramifications of using genetically modified corn. “I don’t think that we’ve been cautious enough,” he says.

Yet, in spite of these issues, Ian says that farmers and ranchers are doing “reasonable and wonderful things.” Mosaic tried to capture the farmers’ challenges, while honoring the work ethic and commitment that they hold in common with their
forbears.

“Their values are rooted in a tradition I really respect—raising a family and growing food. But they are hooked into a system that yields little flexibility and little money.”

Is our country subsidizing the right system? With an investment of $350, Ian and his colleagues produced 177 bushels of corn that in 2004 brought $1.65 per bushel—a net loss of 33 cents per bushel.

Ian’s film includes archival footage, original music, and promotes dialogue about the way America farms and eats. Its release is scheduled for May 2005; go to www.KingCorn.net for more information.

Jon Wright ’75
Making artisanal cheeses on Taylor Farm

“You wore your good jeans today,” jokes Doug Carleton, a carpenter and handyman at Taylor Farm in Londonderry, Vermont. The recipient of the jibe, Jon Wright ’75, nods his head and steps away from Bess. “She’s really a pet,” Jon says of the sow, oversized even by swine standards.

Jon also introduces the farm’s primary “pets,” dairy cows with names such as Sally (who possesses the most substantial udders), Nadine (who bore a calf in late November), Harriet, Darla and Sunflower.

The son of a Manhattan physician, Jon is a farmer in an idyllic, 19th-century sense—or at least, his hands, and his jeans, do get quite dirty.

Jon’s interest in farming began when he visited Vermont as a child and strengthened when his Milton senior project, advised by Bryan Cheney, centered on photographing the 150-year-old Taylor Farm. After Milton, Jon attended agriculture school, where he was discouraged from pursuing an agricultural career. He completed a program in forest management at the University of Vermont’s School of Natural Resources and planned to focus on forestry consulting until he learned that Taylor Farm was vacant. Everyone said they were crazy when Jon and his wife, Kate, moved to Taylor Farm as tenants. (They would later buy the core 18 acres, surrounded by over 500 acres of Vermont Land Trust land and near three popular ski areas.) After 10 years as a conventional dairy farmer, Jon began to think “everyone” might have been right.

To sustain the farm, Jon and Kate began offering sleigh rides in the winter, established a monthly Farm Day for visitors and used the property’s “little house” as a guesthouse. Kate set up a roadside farm stand to sell baked goods. But until they discovered cheese, these efforts weren’t enough.

While people have been making cheese for about 6,000 years, Jon started in 1999. Part art, part science, cheese-making capitalizes on the curdling of milk. Enter the farm’s pristine cheese-making room, where Jon and his team warm the milk and separate the curd from the whey (hard, isn’t it, to avoid the image of Little Miss Muffet?) to see artisanal cheese-making made possible by the rich milk of 45 Holstein cows in the barn next door. One hundred pounds of their milk will make 10 pounds of garlic, chipolte, maple-smoked, cumin or regular Gouda—an average of 1,200 pounds per week. (The average cow produces over 17,000 pounds of milk each year.)

Jon isn’t alone in these cheese-making endeavors. His core staff of Doug, herdsman John Michalski, farm help Scott Bratton and cheesemaker Tamry Underwood care for the animals; milk the cows; warm the milk; add the culture and “hoop” the warm curds in metal rounds lined with cheesecloth; weight and press the developing cheese, bathe the cheese in brine, and leave it to dry for 10 days when it is hand-dipped four times in wax and put in the cheese cave to age.

The Wrights’ decision to keep the farm is reinforced, Jon says, whenever they help a cow deliver her calf at 2 a.m. or when one of the Wright daughters helps make a batch of cheese or when his oldest daughter rides horseback after doing her homework. (The many awards from the American Cheese Society aren’t hurting their confidence much, either.)

Jon’s wife, Kate, made the farm’s first batches of cheese, while consultant Peter Dixon guided the family as they developed their idea into a commercially viable product.

“I do everything that no one else wants to do,” Jon says of his role on the farm. “I tend to most of the morning milking around 4:30 a.m., general farm management, fieldwork and help out with marketing and promotion.

“The farm is a real community effort. We’ve had tremendous support primarily because we are one of the last farms left around here.”

Taylor Farm, part of the Vermont Cheese Council of which Jon is vice president, is Vermont’s only Gouda producer. The Wright family is committed to sustainable agriculture. They fertilize their rotationally grazed pastures and hay fields naturally and do not treat their cows with growth hormones.

Gouda has made Jon’s farm tenable, but—despite product placement in markets such as Manhattan’s Zabar’s and Murray’s and Boston’s Savenor’s—the financial benefits do not yet rival the personal ones, which is okay with John: “After years of tremendous responsibility, hard work and raising a family, I have found great spiritual and emotional rewards in this work,” he says.

To find Jon’s cheese or to visit the farm’s chicken, dog, cats, rabbits, 45 cows, nine horses and one turtle, go to www.taylorfarmvermont.com.

Nicole Bernard Dawes ’91
Her organic crackers please consumers

“Our crackers look familiar and taste great, so we attract a lot of crossover business from people who might not usually buy organic,” says Nicole Dawes ’91, co-founder, president and chief operating officer of Late July Organic Snacks.

“We are part of creating a sustainable future, which is why we’re all doing this.”

Nicole also manages marketing—earning an “irresistible” review from the New York Times—customer relations and even steps in as forklift operator for her fledgling company, Late July. She says that in the first year of business, the company was continually in triage: Each day she mended logistical snags, soothing retailers as distribution details began to make processes more routine.

“I remember that line from Apollo 13 coming into my head: ‘All right, there are a thousand things that have to happen in order for us to survive—and we are on number eight.’ I could relate.”

Most new businesses go out of business, so Nicole explains that keeping a streamlined staff—while you struggle for shelf space and refine the mechanics of distribution—is crucial to keeping a business viable. She notes that she has mixed feelings about food giants such as Kraft and Heinz “going organic” as the market for organic products grows. “In the end, the object is to grow the industry,” she says. “Thank goodness America loves the underdog.

“This year, business could not be better,” she says. “We’re in over 6,000 stores and growing.”

Nicole, whose mother ran a natural-foods store in Harwich on the Cape in the 1970s, grew up eating tempeh sandwiches and carob-covered rice cakes.

Since then, food and its production have been close to Nicole and her family, who introduced all-natural Cape Cod Potato Chips and Chatham Village Croutons to supermarkets in the ’80s and ’90s. But Nicole had no immediate plans to take the lead in a new family business until, when she was pregnant in 2001 and craving saltine crackers, she found supermarket shelves bereft of organic crackers.

Nicole convinced her father, Steve Bernard, to join the venture. Market research showed that the $4 billion cracker market might just have room for a familiar product—featuring organic ingredients and without trans fats and artificial coloring. Relying on old-fashioned recipes from Farmer’s Almanacs she spent months preparing sample batches of crackers in her New York City apartment.

“The guiding principle for me,” she says, “is would I feel proud and comfortable giving this to my son.

“So many products, like some yogurts for children, masquerade as ‘health food.’ But if you read the label, you may reconsider feeding some products to your family.”

Nicole quickly realized that her biggest challenge would be maintaining “mouth feel” or the customary cracker flakiness that comes from the use of hydrogenated oils. “I was never willing to compromise taste,” Nicole says.

Ensuring a shelf life to please consumers was another challenge, as was designing perfect packaging—a nostalgic beachscape, in this case. The result is bite-sized cheddar cheese snacks, round saltine crackers, classic rich and peanut butter and cheddar cheese sandwich crackers.

The sandwich crackers are made with organic peanut butter and organic cheese. All of the crackers are made without hydrogenated oils (where the trans fats hide), preservatives, artificial flavors or colors.

“If you have a society that relies on processed food, then it makes sense for people to read the labels and understand what’s in their food.

“But there’s so much to worry about in the world. The quality of our crackers will never be one of them.”

For more about Nicole’s company, go to www.latejuly.com.

Heather Sullivan

 

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