Bocuse d’Or is a biennial cooking competition where 24 teams compete on the world’s culinary stage, proudly demonstrating their exceptional skills. Team USA, supported by Ment’or, represents the United States on this international platform. It is both an opportunity for American chefs to showcase their talent and collaborate with the world.
Team USA uses vegetables from The Chef’s Garden, with the Culinary Vegetable Institute serving as the site of this special fundraiser. On September 11, Farmer Lee gave a farm tour to VIP chefs, followed by drinks from Charlotte Voisey. Then, everyone celebrated with a meal prepared by Executive Chef Jamie Simpson, Chefs Mathew Peters, Aaron Bludorn, Junior Borges, Melissa Rodriguez, Robert Sulatycky, and Britt-Marie Culey.
This event was about much more than food or competition or famous chefs. It was a moment when we collectively realized how we can truly be proud of our country—about our sense of community, our commitment to quality, our successes, and our failures. It was about brushing ourselves off, getting up again, standing straight, growing and prosper, and becoming better.
This was about the United States of America. Team USA.
Spotlight on the Future
As part of our focus on sustainability, we want to be a role model for farmers yet to come. More specifically, we want to “shape and redefine sustainable agriculture in our country by creating a template to attract, inspire, and retain young farmers. Through our own traditional farming practices and philosophy, we hope to encourage the next generation of farmers to value, protect, and, if necessary, restore America’s farmland to ensure that our fields continue producing the safest, most nutritious, and flavorful products possible. We hope that our legacy will be establishing a farming model that ensures safe and sustainable growing practices that protect and enrich the consumer for generations to come.”
Here are a few ways we put this philosophy into practice in 2019.
First, we participated in the Edison Works program at a local elementary school. This district-wide program was created to help students succeed, especially those who may not attend a four-year college. It connects them with area businesses, allowing them to understand what kind of work takes place at them and what jobs could be available when it is time for these students to go to work.
We’ve been part of the Edison Works program from the start, adopting the fourth grade in 2019, which consists of three classes with about 30 students per group.
Members of the farm team helped the students grow two varieties of lettuce, French breakfast radishes, cherry bomb radishes, and pea tendrils, talked to them about photosynthesis in an age-appropriate way, answered their insightful questions, and much more. Chef Jamie prepared carrots for them in four different ways, in more than one color, and the group discussed flavor, texture, cooking techniques, and more. This spring, the students will tour the farm.
In 2019, we were fortunate to have Robert Lagrosas from the Philippines work on our farm as part of our student internship agricultural program. Robert worked throughout the farm, including seeding, harvesting, soil making, food safety and packing, and at the Culinary Vegetable Institute. Supervisors guided and taught Robert in each area and shared how each task contributed to the overall operations and success of The Chef’s Garden.
We’ve been partnering with Communicating for Agriculture Exchange Programs (CAEP) for over twenty years. We bring young adults worldwide to the farm to share and learn about agricultural practices. The students gain farming knowledge and confidence, experiencing another culture as they prepare for a future in farming in their homeland.
These one-year internships are given to college students or those who have completed them. In 2019, ten student interns from Uganda, Rwanda, Brazil, the Philippines, Japan, Tanzania, South Africa, Viet Nam, and Columbia worked at The Chef’s Garden.
Although we’d love to share insights from each of them, we’ll just include this one from Robert for this post. The key to future success, he said, is the most important lesson he learned from his mentors at The Chef’s Garden. “With hard work and dedication, surely you will be successful in business and in life,” he said. “Just be resilient, diligent, and focused. I think I can make it a long way.”
Finally, as part of our spotlight on the future, we collaborate with Chef Tim Michitsch, the culinary arts program director at the Lorain County Joint Vocational School. In August, his students—led by LCJVS graduate Chef Scott Schneider, Chef de Cuisine at New York’s acclaimed Ai Fiori—prepared an amazing meal at the Culinary Vegetable Institute.
One of the students, Megan Ratha, shared that working alongside professional chefs gave her a unique opportunity to learn and contribute, one she wouldn’t be able to experience in a typical high school setting.
“I helped at Twelve Days of Christmas, and they had a whole pig head in the oven,” she said. “It was really interesting to look at! And I helped with one of the desserts. It was origami chips, and we attached them to wood. At points I felt like I was in the way just a little bit, but then other times I’d be useful. And you get to learn how to properly clean stuff and properly store stuff. It’s helpful.”
Grooming future farmers and chefs. It’s just a part of what we do, and we’re grateful for the opportunity.
Honoring the Vegetable of the Year: Mixed Carrots
It wouldn’t make sense to share the highlights of 2019 without mentioning our farm-fresh produce—and, to keep this post from becoming the size of a book, we decided to focus on just one vegetable and let it represent them all.
In December 2018, we named mixed carrots as the vegetable of the year. We chose this vegetable because of its incredible flavor, earthy yet sweet, and because the different varieties of carrots offer subtly differing flavor profiles. Then, there is that crunch! It’s hard to pick a vegetable with a more satisfying chomp.
Although carrots in the grocery store tend to be the same color and shape, at The Chef’s Garden, we have long and short ones, round and narrow ones, in a wide variety of eye-catching hues. Nutritionists encourage people to eat the rainbow, and you can go a long way toward accomplishing that by choosing different colors of carrots as you plan your menus. The versatility is truly incredible.
Carrots have numerous health benefits, and because they pair so well with other deliciously nutritious produce (peas and carrots, anyone?), you can increase health benefits through flavorful pairings.
Chef Jamie has used it numerous times in 2019 to honor our vegetable of the year, including when he visited the children participating in the Edison Works program.
“Each student got four different cups with carrots prepared in a different way,” Jamie says. “Pureed, juiced, pickled, and blanched.”
He also partnered with Executive Chef Jessica Biederman from The Bristol inside the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston, taking farm-fresh carrots and dehydrating them into flour that was used to make pasta dough. Carrot tops were inlaid, along with micro tarragon and viola petals. “The pasta is super thin, so it cooks really fast,” Chef Jessica explained. “It comes out looking like stained glass.”
You can find ways to explore every iteration of the carrot here.
Highlighting Our Evolving Language
Finally, we want to praise the changing language of responsible farming. You may have noticed that we’re shifting from talking about sustainable farming to regenerative farming. What’s fascinating is that we aren’t changing how we actually farm—just the words we use to describe our practices.
This evolution began in October 2015 when the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture said that farmers and other people involved in agriculture should “come up with a single definition of sustainability to avoid confusing the public with various meanings of the term in food and production methods.”
Now, we must admit that we’d been so busy farming in responsible ways that we hadn’t really stopped to examine what the word “sustainable” truly meant—but we’re glad we have. Here is our deep dive into the differences between sustainable farming versus regenerative farming. As a short summary:
- “Sustainable” implies a focus on keeping the ecosystem stable, on keeping everything as it exists now.
- “Regenerative” goes beyond that to making soil even healthier than it was before—and that’s been our focus for several decades. It’s just that before 2019, this wasn’t the word we used.
We’re happy to see how the concept of regenerative farming is trending. You can find more information about how we use regenerative agricultural practices here. Regenerative farming has been defined as a “holistic systems approach to agriculture that encourages continual on-farm innovation for environmental, social, economic and spiritual well-being.”
At The Chef’s Garden, we are deeply dedicated to growing vegetables slowly and gently, in full accord with nature. One of the key components of our regenerative farming practices is the use of cover crops, maximizing their effectiveness by:
- rotating where they’re planted
- consistently and repeatedly planting them
- planting a diverse mix of cover crops
- harvesting and saving cover crop seeds for successive plantings
And we do so slowly and gently, in full accord with nature.
Happy New Year!
We hope that 2019 was all that you hoped it would be, and we wish you a happy, healthy, regenerative 2020!