Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, New York. This week Peter writes:
Are we approaching another food watershed? Did I say, “Food watershed?” Well, if there is such a thing, I think I have experienced a number of them. And it may be these “watersheds” that answer a question I have been frequently asked.: “Why on earth have you become involved in farming?” My earliest memories of food are grim, having been a child in Britain during the privations of World War II. Everything was rationed in ounces: meat, butter, sweets, everything. One egg a month for children and pregnant women (if there were enough eggs available), and they could be any kind of egg, from a duck, goose, or chicken. Whenever my mother asked what I wanted for breakfast, I answered: ”Yegg! I want a yegg.” I usually got porridge. With the Nazi U-boat blockade, Britain was hard pressed to feed its population, having formerly relied on the Low Countries and the Empire for much of its food. The government, out of necessity, took charge of the distribution of food, meticulously measuring it out. Parks and public spaces were plowed and planted in vegetables. If bread was found in a household’s garbage, there were stiff fines. It was inculcated in us at school that there could be no waste. Men had died, we were told again and again, in the merchant marine wheat convoys from Canada that had threaded their way through the Nazi blockade. To deal with the stale bread we at 13 Northumberland Street ate many bread puddings. When my mother married a Yank, we found ourselves, a few months after the defeat of Germany, living in northern Illinois, in Hinsdale, a German-American enclave. Hearing all the German spoken around us, Mother would ask “Did we win the war or lose the war?” But what I focused on was the food
Since my American stepfather was a returning veteran, and there was a huge housing shortage, we moved into his mother’s household with its large extended family on Bruner Street. Breakfasts there featured, among other things, two large platters containing several dozen fried eggs, more eggs than I had seen in a whole year in Wales. So impressed was I that, when I was introduced to the third-grade class I was to join, then led to the front of the room and asked if I had anything to say, I proudly chirped, probably to the great puzzlement of my classmates, “I had three eggs for breakfast!” Meals at Bruner Street included many things I had never seen before: eggplant, corn on the cob, spaghetti, cold cuts. And there was chicken every Sunday (killed on Saturday night) and generous portions of meat. Where, I wondered, did all this bounty come from? I soon realized there were 100 or so chickens in the backyard from which our eggs and Sunday dinner came, a dovecote in the roof of the garage for squab, and across the street almost a square block planted in vegetables. So plentiful was this garden that harvesting required a large cart with wagon wheels. In the basement, the fruit room shelves were lined with canned corn, tomatoes, beans, jams, crab apples, quince, and relishes. Another dark storage room had bins of potatoes and onions, barrels filled with winter apples, carrots in boxes filled with sand, and from the rafters hung bacon from the last homegrown pig.
In contrast to the government managed food of wartime Britain, Hinsdale represented what I would have to now call the traditional, largely self-sufficient American household. But not totally self-sufficient, as our household also depended on Meyer’s Grocery, just a few blocks away. I hung out there many afternoons with my new playmates testing out the glorious flavors of popsicles and ice cream bars. Marlene, Mr. Meyer’s daughter, was in my class at school, and I, therefore, got to see first hand the very prosperous life an independent grocer then lived. And then I began to hear about something called a “supermarket,” at about the same time I began hearing about something called a “subdivision.” Within a short period of time Mr. Meyer’s grocery store was gone, and he was working as a butcher in the supermarket in the center of town. Then one day I came out the back door of our house to find, to my dismay, all of the chickens hanging upside down, tied to the clotheslines. One by one their throats were slit, the ground turned a gory red, and their gutted, plucked carcasses went off to a cold storage facility. The pigeons soon met a similar fate. Gradually, the vegetable garden contracted and contracted, and canning and preserving activities wound down. The basement fruit and storage rooms became derelict . I now realize we had quickly, and without explanation, passed into a new age, an age of food dependency, an age when the supermarket and agri-business would gradually take control of the American food supply.
But then there was, for me, a reprieve from this “modernization” when, in 1961, I took a teaching position at the American College in Izmir, Turkey, and went back in time—almost, it seemed, to medieval days. This was a personal watershed. Turkey was then stuck in a time warp, still recovering, first from the loss of Ataturk’s leadership in 1938, then from its isolation during the Second World War. Its food system was still largely dependent on the peasantry bringing their produce directly into the towns and cities on market days. On Wednesdays and Sundays, before sunrise, streams of horses and wagons, donkeys, and small carts piled with vegetables and fruits filed into Izmir’s neighborhoods, and the peasants set up their stalls for market day. Meat was available in small neighborhood shops. Lacking refrigeration, the butchers hung a sheep or side of beef on large hooks and hacked off pieces as customer’s arrived—there were no special cuts. When I purchased my first chicken I was shocked to see the shopkeeper appear with a live chicken, take it out to the curb, chop its head off, and hand it to me by its feet to carry home. Milk and eggs arrived at our doorstep. Every few days a peasant wearing high leather boots and a voluminous coat arrived at our door on a huge white horse with milk cans strapped to the saddle. He carefully filled our bowl with milk (unpasteurized), and reached into his deep pockets for eggs. Food-wise, summers and fall in Izmir were, in some ways, glorious, since the long fjord-like valleys of the Aegean are incredibly fertile and produce the best fruit and vegetables I have ever eaten. Since Turkey then had no real food distribution system, lacking as it did a viable road system, a wholesaling infrastructure, and a canning industry, the glut of fruits and vegetables pouring in from the countryside resulted in rapidly dropping prices, and we found ourselves consuming, for instance, kilos of strawberries and peaches. Winter was another matter as we found ourselves more and more limited to root vegetables, and began to crave things like greens and tomatoes. Our second winter we heard of a small canning operation in Izmir but were warned that if we were to get anything we had to line up at the factory the day the canning was happening. We considered ourselves lucky, indeed, to get around a dozen cans of tomatoes that we carefully rationed throughout the winter. During my three years in Turkey, I had been returned to a world of unadulterated food, a seasonal-food world, a world that was both wonderful and difficult. On returning to the U.S., the world of supermarkets at first seemed wonderful and convenient, but despite the apparent variety, and year-round availability of foods, there seemed something missing in the array on the supermarket shelves. Flavor was definitely one of the obvious things (safety, not so obvious). Connection to the seasons was another.
On my return, I had expected to see some foods available regardless of season, but I had never envisioned that within a few years winter vegetables from Florida and California would be joined by fish from the Pacific and the Mediterranean, and fruit and vegetables from Mexico and South America, as well as exotic foods from around the world, a trend that continues to seemingly expand the sources of American’s food tastes (while, actually, the supermarket is subversively reducing the American diet to a narrow uniformity). Now we are, perhaps, at the brink of a new watershed. We seem to be developing a new awareness about food and how and where it is produced. We have organic food movements, slow food movements, locavare movements, and a biodynamic movement, to name a few. Films, television programs, and books question the very basis of American agri-business and its practices. There is a small but growing movement to return to farming on a small scale, to farms more like the almost extinct family farm, to farms that have a direct connection with their customers. The blowback we are now seeing from agri- business interests (exemplified by “The Omnivore’s Delusion,” see the two most recent installments, prior to this one, onthis blog), while disturbing, is also encouraging since it suggests we may actually be beginning to make an impact on the way America sees its food. Is it “Apres nous le deluge”? Or, rather, “The Omnivore’s Deluge”? —Peter Davies
