Dear friends of PTB Farm,

When I’m not growing food, I’m preparing, cooking, and dreaming about food. Cooking and farming are similar in many ways and both are lifelong endeavors: building on past experiences, gaining confidence, and working towards better flavor. No harvest season or dish ever gets executed exactly the same way twice; the elements for both are variables that produce iterations over time. No two seasons have the exact same weather; no two onions the exact same flavor; no two seeds the exact same DNA.
 

 

As a small farmer, selling my products at the local farmer’s markets, I routinely get asked how to cook the food at my farmstand, be it a pork belly, lamb ribs, kohlrabi, fennel, or leeks. More often than not, I have techniques, not recipes, to offer.

I farm in the same way I cook; by technique, not precise steps. Over the years, I’ve tried new crops, learned new skills, worked side jobs, and even considered other professions, because the truth is, it’s extremely difficult to make a living from farming.  But I’ve stayed in it, filled with renewed hope for each new season ahead, because of my real and profound love for food.
 

Being a small farmer means being a peasant, and peasants eat what we grow. Farming affords me the opportunity to cook with some of the best ingredients around.  But because farming is my business, I reserve the highest quality for our customers, and relish the abundant “seconds” in my kitchen. We eat the mislabeled package of pork chops, the arugula that’s gotten too big to sell, and the funny, misshapen fennel.

Being a peasant farmer also means hoping for change, a shift in the power dynamics, and believing that another world is possible. Because despite agriculture's troubled and complicated past (and present) regarding the exploitation of humans, the environment, and farm animals; farming is a vital part of creating a better world. Small, ecological farms can feed their community, heal the earth, work to reverse climate change, respect animal lives, and refuse the exploitation of human labor.  

So what do peasant farmers eat? We eat cheaply, with what we have, mostly seconds or culls, and often we eat fast. We buy and barter what we don’t produce, eating as much as possible from the dynamic community of local food producers. We often don’t have the time to create elaborate feasts, and so rely on quick standbys, and sometimes we skip meals. But we relish the feast times and will consciously take the time to turn an unpopular cut of meat or an ugly vegetable into an everyday feast.

Some days, I set aside time to gather up vegetables from the garden, pull off my boots to let my bare feet cool on the kitchen floor, and thaw a small piece of meat from the freezer. I flip through a stack of cookbooks and glean ideas from different recipes. Perhaps I’ll make a version of Chinese red pork belly with spring vegetables, or roast beets in the oven to top the arugula salad. Perhaps I’ll spend the time to make a fresh pasta, combining eggs and flour on the table slowly until I have a soft and pliable dough. I’ll roast vegetables with olive oil, grill lamb hearts outdoors, or bread and fry a cutlet. Or perhaps I’ll sear a pork shank early in the afternoon and then turn it down to simmer in a bath of sweet vermouth and tomatoes for hours until the meat falls off the bone, while I go back to work.

 

Other days, the work is more urgent, and we’ll scrounge for quick snacks, barely breaking for a real meal. By the end of the day, I’m too exhausted and dirty to manage cooking or cleaning, so we dig a frozen pizza out of the freezer, or pull on a fresh shirt and head to the closest Mexican place with plentiful cheap beer and big portions.

In the winter months we devote time to curing meats, hanging prosciutto hams to age in the unheated back room of our old log cabin. In the spring, when there’s an overabundance of greens, we turn unsold brassicas, like cabbage and bok choi, into sauerkraut and kimchi to last us through the hottest parts of summer when we will long for the pungent greens so abundant now. In the waning days of summer, we can and dry tomatoes, peppers, and green beans, packing them away in the pantry for winter meals to come. As the fall air begins to cool, we begin to think of filling the freezer with venison again. And then it all starts again. The seeds in the greenhouse, the hours ahead of transplanting, weeding, and harvesting. The pigs farrow again and the lambs begin jumping around in the first green grass.

This is how we peasant farmers eat.