cut through all my doubts about the importance of cooking, of gathering in the kitchen engaged in simple, joyful tasks. Sharing time, working with our hands, and chatting keeps these traditions relevant, no matter the distance and differences.
Thanksgiving is the finale for the farmers at market, and on Black Friday, Christmas-tree vendors take over the stalls. But my journey into this place, Minnesota, through its food and its people, had just begun.
I discovered the Wedge Community Co-op, just a block from our home, one of the country’s first. In the early 1970s, the People’s Pantry, a food-buying club located on a University of Minnesota professor’s back porch, had grown into a neighborhood co-op that inspired the area’s next thirteen independent member-owned stores. Organized around “cooperative principles” of education, sustainability, and fair wages, they became centers of food advocacy. I was drawn to the produce, the brightest and freshest available, as well as the information the Wedge provided. Everything on the racks was labeled with its source as well as how it was grown—conventional, transitional, organic. The Wedge’s newsletter and its flyers addressed every concern.
To work off my forty-dollar lifetime membership, I stacked organic apples and spritzed lettuce on early Saturday mornings, and learned from Edward Brown, produce manager, about his innovative financial agreements with farmers. Brown would guarantee a price for carrots or apples in advance of the growing season instead of looking for the lowest price posted by distributors each week. Sometimes this worked in the Wedge’s favor, as when there was a shortage of an item and prices soared. In other instances, the farmer got a bonus, if the Wedge had promised more than current market price. Volunteering at the Wedge was like taking a course in food policy as well as ones in nutrition, cooking, and environmental studies. Mark Ritchie, former Minnesota secretary of state, once said, “Anyone in DFL [Democratic-Farmer-Labor] politics probably got their start at a co-op.” For me, the Wedge was a source of more than good-tasting carrots and bulk oatmeal.
I’d found a job with a large advertising agency, writing promotional copy and brochures for food companies (Land O’Lakes, Jerome Foods, and Snoboy produce). I had wanted to write about food for a living and while this was not the kind of food I’d anticipated covering, it was the closest I could get at the time. I hoped the professional experience might fill out my short résumé and lead me to the kind of work I yearned to do. On weekends, I was at the Wedge or cooking for an ever-widening circle of friends. In those years, with no kids, I had endless hours to plan and shop for dinners of osso buco, potatoes Anna, tarte tatin, and homemade bread. And it seemed—in Minneapolis, anyway—that a good invitation was often returned in kind.
One evening, at a formal affair in a tony Kenwood mansion, I was dreading a meal of catered overcooked chicken. So I could hardly contain my delight when we were served honest home cooking: rosemary lamb stew with olives and buttered noodles, simple green salad in mustardy dressing, and a runny Wisconsin cheese with tart chutney and baguette, all followed by dark-chocolate truffles.
To my happy surprise, my tablemates, Meg Anderson and David Washburn, did not want to talk about the Senate race or the theater. Instead, they shared with me their newest project, an organic farm, Red Cardinal, the first community supported agriculture (CSA) in the state.
In answer to my rapid-fire questions, Washburn patiently explained diversified crop rotation, pest-eating ladybugs that replaced pesticides, and intensive composting practices in lieu of chemical fertilizers. He relayed the intricate calculations made to plant crops so that each week’s delivery contained an interesting assortment for the member’s boxed shares. Before I sipped the last drop of champagne, I’d written a check for a piece of the farm.
Washburn had just sold a chain of successful fitness studios and was no stranger to the challenge of starting a membership-based business. Anderson had left her job as a buyer for a department store. The couple, backed by family resources, was committing their entrepreneurial and artistic talents to this new endeavor. Neither Anderson nor Washburn came from a farming background, but their knowledge of health and wellness, the environment, and social justice issues ignited their mission. Plus Anderson, a master gardener, could now devote more time to growing her grandfather’s heirloom peonies for sale to restaurants and shops.
The third partner, Everett Meyers, grew up on the farm next door to Red Cardinal and was working as an agricultural technical trainer for the Peace Corps in Ecuador. He’d envisioned starting a farm on his family’s land when he returned home, and so brought to the partnership an experience with small-scale agriculture and a knowledge of the land that became crucial to Red Cardinal’s success.
That first season the pick-up days at a neighbor’s home became the social highlight in our week. By that time, Kevin and I had three young boys—Matt, Kip, and Tim—who tumbled on the front lawn while we chatted with Anderson and Washburn about how an early thaw had hurt the raspberry crop, why a cold snap had helped sweeten the brussels sprouts, and what to do with those tomatillos and kohlrabies. Every box was beautifully arranged with Anderson’s artistic eye—tiny yellow pear tomatoes ringed with baby bok choy, garlic scapes nestled beside potatoes the size of my thumb. On our drives home, an uncommon sibling truce reigned in the backseat as the boys munched on carrots and fished for raspberries straight from the box.
On CSA workdays, we’d leave our own garden and housework and head to the country to plant, weed, and harvest. For lunch, Anderson would cook up stir-fries, salads, and bean dishes for us volunteer workers and the fifteen farmhands. Among those farmhands were a law-school applicant, a retired food-company executive, a FedEx office manager changing careers, a young couple hoping to start their own farm, and immigrants from Guatemala and Cambodia. When they’d finished their meal, the crew would lie under the trees, hats covering their eyes after a day that had begun at 4:00 a.m.; all were content. No masks needed to protect them from pesticide fumes, no rubber overalls to guard against fertilizer, no huge tractors in sight. Come sunset, we’d kick back for a potluck and sing folk songs accompanied by the strumming of a beat-up guitar.
One afternoon, standing among Anderson’s peonies, looking over the rows of kale, the sprouting carrots, and the sprawling zucchini, I sensed my place in this web. I took it in, all of it—the pond, the green fields, the pale-pink-and-white flowers, the buzzing bees, even the mosquitoes—and wondered, how can you love a place, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss? Must it all give way? Like the farm stands of New Jersey, must everything give way?
In my day job of writing about frozen cut green beans and turkey cutlets, I’d learned to develop recipes and give context to a dish, skills I applied to the newsletter I created for Red Cardinal’s members. Here I could share news about how many tons of carrots the farm produced, about the gallons of fertilizers and pesticides not sprayed on fields to run off into the Mississippi River, and about the foxes, voles, and eagles that thrived on the land. I wrote about how well-tended, rich soil, full of nutrients, grows the best-tasting, most nutritious food, and passed on Anderson’s cooking tips and recipes.
More than anything else, the CSA changed what and how I cooked. Every week the CSA box was a surprise and often a challenge. I had learned to cook by closely adhering to recipes, much as I learned to play piano by following the strict dictates of my teacher’s sheet music. But now, faced with the wonderfully eclectic and unpredictable weekly share, I began to improvise. I waited. I responded. I relinquished control of my kitchen to the whims of our moody northern climate. Opening that CSA box felt like turning off the radio and walking into the pulse and swing of a live brassy jazz band. And, just like a dancer adapts her steps to the beat of the music, I adapted my cooking to the rhythms of a land that served up so much variety. Finally, conventionality became the exception, not the rule.
Through the
