The Future of Our Food: New York Times Looks West

The New York Times panel described below was held on October 5, 2016, a month before the recent election, but brought out some key insights that I hope to explore in future posts in this series. Installments over the next few months will include interviews with farmers, food activists, plant breeders and policy wonks to try to get a handle on the seismic shift in our local food landscape due to the change of administrations in Washington.

The New York Times has been fascinated with Portland for years now, featuring it as a travel destination, for sure, but mostly focused on watching its food and restaurant scene evolve from a backwater of middle class meh to a powerhouse of groundbreaking local, seasonal, chef-driven cuisine. In its own transition from a national newspaper to a national media corporation, the Times has been expanding its New York-centric, issues-based series called Times Talks to a more national platform.

Recently it brought this form of live journalism to Portland, sending out Times national food correspondent Kim Severson to moderate a panel titled "The Future of Food in Portland.” The panel featured local food notables Piper Davis of Grand Central Bakery; Kanth Gopalpur of the Business Oregon Commission; chef Joshua McFadden of Ava Gene’s and Tusk; and Amanda Oborne, Vice President of Food and Farms at Ecotrust.

In an interview before the event I asked Severson why the Times chose to come to Portland.

"I’m just fascinated with where Portland is going to go now," she said. "Because [the city] got really cute and we all fell in love with it. Portland was like a really attractive 20-year-old college sophomore with a great life. But now what?"

Echoing that question after introducing her panelists, she opened the discussion asking if it wasn't time for Portland to mature a little bit.

"It all goes back to Colin the chicken," Piper Davis answered, referring to a much-joked-about sketch on the TV series "Portlandia" where two foodies pester their server with questions about their entrée. "Those of us who care where our food comes from can no longer ask that question." Instead, she said, the concern has shifted in her mind: Did this food leave the soil in better condition than it started?

"Major problems still need to be solved," she continued, saying that the national perception is that most of the work is done, when in reality people aren't talking about the gaps in the food system when it comes to the environment, sustainability and universal access to good food regardless of income or where a person lives.

Severson then turned to Josh McFadden and asked him about the city's "cheffy culture," asking how its Olympic-level chef game will affect Portland's producer-driven reputation.

Answering that he initially moved back to Portland from stints in San Francisco, Chicago and New York because of the people more than the food scene here, he said he found that "the product is as good or better than anyplace else," and that local farmers like Anthony and Carol Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm and John Eveland and Sally Brewer of Gathering Together Farm are producing innovative crops at the highest level.

Severson herself is no stranger to the Northwest, having lived in the region and worked for newspapers in Seattle, Anchorage and right here in Portland during a short stint at the Oregonian.

In our interview I asked what differentiates the Northwest and its food from that found in the rest of the country. She paused.

"There’s just something about the mix of the ruggedness of the place and the purity of the raw ingredients here," she said. "The most memorable things I’ve eaten come from the Northwest."

She added that when she was working in Alaska she got sick of salmon, referring to it as "the zucchini of Alaska." But having been away for decades now, and with wild-caught salmon a rare thing to find on the East Coast, she had an epiphany.

"Last night [at a Portland restaurant] I had a beautiful, perfectly seared piece of wild salmon," she said. "It was like heaven to me and, especially on the East Coast, the beauty of wild salmon—I know it sounds so cliché and terrible even as I’m saying it—but it’s spectacular."

Bottom line?

"I think your baseline of deliciousness is very high here," Severson said. "Your baseline, how good food that grows around here tastes, I think that’s exceptional. Exceptional."

In the South, where Severson is now based, she said, "There’s some really great produce, but it’s so crazy hot it’s tricky to grow stuff there. But there’s something very clean about it here that other places don’t have. There’s a freshness here that makes it super special to me."

Any Portland cook can tell you that freshness also has a lot to do with the proximity of local farms to the city's core, a point that was brought up by Grand Central's Piper Davis.

"No one talks about the urban growth boundary and food, but it's critically connected," Davis said of the line drawn around the city in 1980 as a land use planning boundary to control urban expansion onto farm and forest lands.

Amanda Oborne of Ecotrust, tasked with developing The Redd, an effort in inner Southeast Portland's former produce district designed to support local food enterprises, said that Portland is a city of innovators and, as with the urban growth boundary in the '80s, is still experimenting with ideas to provide services to make food more accessible and sustainable.

"The Redd is not about the food scene, it's about the food system," she said of what is envisioned as a working hub for the regional food system.

It's an idea that Severson echoed in our interview as a distinguishing characteristic of the city.

"The ability to make things happen in this city, foodwise, the potential [that] if you have an idea you can probably make it happen, is exciting," she said, attributing it to both the city's size and its culture.

"There’s not a lot of people who say no here," Severson mused. "It’s a function of size, of culture and people who are, like, 'Huh, you wanna like have a chicken-powered ancient grain mill and coffee shop? That could be cool.'"

One thing that surprised her, in a city so well known for its food culture, is that there is no food council here to direct, support and develop food policy for Portland, Multnomah County or the metro region. [The now-defunct Portland/Multnomah Food Policy Council served as a citizen-based advisory board to the City of Portland and Multnomah County from 2002-2012 and was dissolved in 2012 due to "lacking relevancy."]

As to the future, Severson seemed of two minds about where the Northwest is headed. "You certainly saw Berkeley get very popular, [but] San Francisco and Northern California cuisine is very hidebound," she said of larger West Coast cities known for innovation in the past but hampered by stagnation and the cost of doing business there. "Maybe Portland can do it differently."

Read the first installment in this series: Post-Election Pondering.

Top photo from The New York Times: (l to r) Josh McFadden, Kanth Gopalpur, Kim Severson, Amanda Oborne, Piper Davis.

Farm Bulletin: A Farmer and Chef Collaborate

Portland is known as a city with a vibrant farm-to-table scene, which can mean anything from a few seasonal specials on the menu, to the chef buying select ingredients at a farmers' market, to a stream of farmers pulling up to the restaurant's door on any given day. And while some chefs may boast a list of favorite farms on their menus, there are few that have the collegial collaboration that contributor Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm describes below.

Once again, Joshua McFadden of Ava Gene's (above) and his staff will host an "Outstanding in the Field" dinner on the 10th of July. The brave lad has to impress a very long table seating about 150 hungry and discerning guests. Fearlessly, as he has proved up to it two years ago. The venue is at Ayers Creek and, if you want to see how these talented impresarios fit the table, bedecked by white linen and an astounding number of wine glasses, into our landscape, tickets are now available.

As with most of the chefs we work with, Joshua and his staff know the farm starting at the soil, not just as a mere delivery service. The staff at Ava Genes—the whole restaurant from prep staff to the service staff—have taken the time to understand the process of growing the food we deliver by visiting the farm and peppering us with questions. This familiarity makes a tangible difference when you are a farmer. Next year when the "Ave Bruma" melons make their public debut, another dimension of the relationship will be revealed: Ave Gene's staff worked with us in selecting desirable culinary traits for this storage melon. McFadden's staff will be visiting the farm next month for a refresher and to give new members a view from the ground.

The meal will bring together the fruits, grains and vegetables that you are sitting among onto the plate as orchestrated by Joshua and his staff. Another familiar face at the farm and to Ramble visitors, Sarah Minnick, will be working our fruit into the dessert. Sarah is also the inspiration for our newly hatched "Sarah's Hay" project, incorporating the complex flavors of the Trigonellae as a vital ingredient of the Pacific Northwest. An active participant in the Sarah's Hay project, Myrtha Zierock, will be on hand to showcase her family's wine from the Dolomites of Italy. Her family has been instrumental in reviving the Teroldego grape of the Trentino-Alto Adige. 

Despite the fact that at the last event our forklift driver (nameless, of course) almost moved one of the toilets with a staff member inside, Outstanding in the Field has decided to return a second time. Having Joshua and his team to cook the meal provides interpreters of the farm's efforts who understand and respect the dialect and idioms of the ground we cultivate. It will be a good evening and we appreciate their confidence in us.

Farm Bulletin: The Season Begins!

Once again I will ponder the utter idiocy of growing soft, early season fruit in the Willamette Valley as I wind my way up Bald Peak on the way to our first Hillsdale Farmers Market of the summer. Fortunately, we have a competent and kind staff, which removes some of the anxiety that the last few days of rain generated. Still, it is a foolish business.

The always-edifying Ramble.

We have rescheduled our annual Farm Ramble for the 12th of October. If you plan on attending, please note the change in your calendars.

Despite some bumps along the way, we are very happy with outlook for the farm this year. We have about 30% more ground in cultivation, which is a huge jump for us and our staff. We hit our stride and it made sense to keep planting. Our manic seeding spree meant we had to buy 4,000 more seven-foot poles for the beans, as well as more of all the other essential inputs. We start parching the frikeh on Monday, and it should be ready two weeks later. By August, things will be tearing along if the weather cooperates.

Katherine Deumling of Cook With What You Have.

Many of you are familiar with our charming customer Ellis—as farmers with two Allis Chalmers machines, we valiantly resist, mostly, calling him Ellis Charmer. His whole life he has brought his parents to the market, and is fully engaged in the process. The secret to his enthusiasm is, no doubt, his mother's talent for preparing the food they have collected at the market. We have enjoyed the food at Katherine Deumling's table and understand why Ellis approaches market day with such gusto.

For several years, Deumling has used her talent to write custom recipes for farms offering CSA boxes, and now she is ready to extend this service to the general farmers' market community. Deumling's recipes are simple, adaptable and free of the dreadful suggestion that food needs to be medicine, i.e. no post-neo-Adelle-Davis preaching. Just a good mix of influences. For $25 a year, less than most cookbooks, you can receive her Seasonal Recipe Collection and eat like Ellis.

Ayers Creek Amish Butter corn.

A relationship that frays after more than a decade and ends up in a separation exacts its financial toll, the alimony. As you will notice on Sunday, we have gone through that recently. After 14 years of using Oregon Tilth as our certifier, our differences led us to an uncontested separation, the surrender of our certificate, and now we are certified as organic by the Oregon Department of Agriculture. Because of the new certifier, we have all new labels and signs. A snappy yellow banner will greet you all on Sunday, as well as more legible labels on the popcorn, cayenne and cornmeal. We are happy with the change on all accounts.

This year, Joshua McFadden of Ava Gene's and his staff will host an Outstanding in the Field dinner on the 12th of July. The brave lad has to impress a table of 180 guests. The venue is at Ayers Creek and, if you want to see how they fit a table with 180 into our landscape, there may be some tickets still available. Like most of the chefs we work with, Joshua and his staff know the farm on the ground, not just as a delivery service. He has taken the time to understand the process of growing food, not just preparing it. It makes a difference when you are a farmer.

Note: The fact that some of this note is in the first person has nothing to do with the aforementioned separation. Carol's foot is on the mend, but standing on the hard pavement for seven hours is not a good idea at the moment. So she will remain on the farm for the first three markets. Be nice to this poor old man, who picked up a few more grey hairs with this week's rain, as he brings you our hard-earned fruits.