On Saturday morning I had the honor of addressing the American delegation at Terra Madre representing the US cooks community along with Sam Hayward of Fore Street in Portland, ME. Here are my remarks:

I am a cook and I love cooking, but mostly I am an eater and, like a lot of you, when I travel it is for food. Actually when I move, it is usually for food. I agree with the late writer Laurie Colwin: my idea of happiness is eating lunch with an old friend while talking about what we are going to make for dinner. Using real ingredients - food grown by people with strong connections to their land and community -is the only way a girl from New Jersey could open an Asian restaurant in North Carolina and even approach some idea of authenticity. Farmers keep chefs, (and the rest of us) in the reality-based community where we belong.

As Michael Pollan described so vividly on Thursday, the relationship between farmers and chefs can be its own healthy eco-system — the more interdependent we can get, the stronger and more sustaining our local food systems will be. I would like to introduce you to our delegation from the Triangle in North Carolina, none of us could do our jobs, or find the via Nizza, without each other.

The Triangle is loaded with busy, grower-only markets due to the energetic, diverse producers who have worked to establish them. Bill Dow was a practicing doctor when he had the then novel idea that the first step in improving our health was creating community access to wholesome local food. What started in Carrboro with Bill, his Ayrshire Farm and two volunteer public health students has become one of the most successful markets of its kind in the country. Also here today are longtime Carrboro Market members Cathy Jones and Mike Perry of Perry-winkle Farm who founded the Fearrington Farmer’s Market and Linda and Charles Gupton of Shiloh Farms, who founded the Wake Forest Farmer’s Market. These markets stay strong and grow with the devotion of market managers, like Sheila Neal, here from the Carrboro Market and committed customers like Chefs Karen & Ben Barker from Magnolia Grill.

Scott Marlow is here from the Rural Advancement Foundation International where he works to save family farms from foreclosure, recover from natural disaster and transition towards sustainability. North Carolina loses 3 small farms every day and many are small-scale tobacco growers. But Stanley Hughes of Pine Knot Farm grew tobacco exclusively until 1996 and is now one of the few certified organic producers at his market, supplying us with sweet potatoes, butter beans, pastured chicken & hogs.

Patrick & Amy Robinette of Harris Acres Farm have made the eventful transition from tobacco to 100% grass-fed beef and they are helping other farmers in their part of the state do the same.

Flo Hawley and Portia McKnight are a triple threat: they cultivate acres of grass, they are livestock managers who recognize each of their pasture-raised Jersey cows by her udders, and, when the chores are done, they are artisan cheese makers. Their primary concern is the health of their animals and it shows in the rich- low yield milk in their Chapel Hill Creamery cheeses and deep flavor of their whey-fed pork.

At Fickle Creek Farm, Ben Bergmann and Noah Ranell’s animals nourish their land – their chickens, pigs, goats, sheep and adopted calves from Chapel Hill Creamery — each serve a specific function in the farm’s ecosystem and will soon allow them to ramp-up their market garden production.

Terra Madre alumnus Betsy & Alex Hitt have been farming together for over 25 years on Peregrine Farm and so know a bit about interdependence and long crop rotations. This summer, they won the Patrick Madden award for Sustainable Agriculture. And along with Ben & Noah they helped found Grower’s Choice Coop in order to save the last independent poultry slaughterhouse in North Carolina. The founding growers are taking a big risk in the hopes that small producers raising chickens in the farmyard and on pasture will continue there work so that North Carolina can taste real, local chicken. We are also lucky to have American Livestock Breads Conservancy nearby in Pittsboro. RAFT Project partners along with Slow Food USA & Chef’s Collaborative, their work is felt everyday on the farms they help populate with rare & delicious breeds.

United, farmers and chefs have potency that agri-business can never manufacture – we have taste on our side. There are certain problems that we are uniquely qualified to tackle together: as educators on the real cost of food, as resources for local eaters and as catalysts for farm-to-school work,

As chefs, we are also in the position to help farmers create dynamic change in our food system by giving our customers the chance to taste responsibly raised meat and begin to understand that there is an alternative to the heavy price we pay for factory meat production.

In North Carolina, one of the most urgent environmental and health issues today is confinement hog production. At any given time there are more pigs than people in North Carolina (11 million) and they only have a 3-day food supply.

But North Carolina’s pork problem is really a national one. Until we once again have a small, diversified farm next door to every BBQ stand and progressive processing and distribution facilities we allow a few corporations to dictate our standards of humane treatment, environmental stewardship, labor practices and taste.

While we are the second largest hog-producing state, very few North Carolinians have ever tasted meat from a pasture-raised pig. But when they do, they get it and they don’t go back. There is no happier experience as a cook than sitting down at the table with a farmer, so let us know when you will be in North Carolina!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Terra Madre 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.