| Food
& Other Important Things
Food, wonderful food
by Don Curto
“There is no love sincerer than the love of food.” —George Bernard Shaw (a vegetarian)
Be patient. This column really is about the Seeds and Spores Family Farm. We’ll get there.
For a long time, I have resisted joining the organic food movement, and becoming an organic-or-nothing person even though its promises are satisfying.
Some practitioners inject elements of religiosity with nonfollowers labeled as heretics, almost. As my friend, the Wise Chemist, notes, the use of the word “organic” to identify foods grown without pesticides or synthetic fertilizer is unfortunate.
All food is organic. The indiscriminant use of the term “organic” can lead to some bizarre results, such as the box of table salt (sodium chloride) labeled as organic. We’ll probably see more of this dangerous nonsense as the giant agribusiness outfits try to take over the organic movement, according to a friend who is himself pretty big in the food business and who knows what’s going on.
The Slow Food Movement, begun in Italy in 1989 by Carlo Petrini (I was an early member from 1993), embodies my best thoughts about how we can determine food quality and safety—a need to know where it comes from, who makes it and how it’s made, the credo of the Slow Food people. To make the most use of these guides requires some knowledge and judgment on the part of the user, who should not be merely a label reader. It also requires suppliers who are trustworthy and who do as they say they will do. No corners should be cut.
Our very best supermarkets here sell some of the worst vegetables and fruits imaginable...an example is the present handsome peaches, hard as a rock, with virtually no flavor after one lets them “ripen” in a bag (Farmer Q can help out with some good peaches); bananas that are soggy when just a pretty yellow; tomatoes so disgusting they should never have left the criminal environment that spawned them.
Supermarkets tend not to sell melons, for instance, by the piece, but by the pound. Thus, bargain-appearing cantaloupe with a big “56c” on the sale sign is really 56 cents a pound, and so what looks like a real bargain ends up costing over $2, as melons are heavy. Deceptive? Yes, but legal. Be careful.
I know no one wants to hear the “when I was growing up” refrain again, but it is true that at that time, in the growing and harvesting season, we, in Marquette got many of our vegetables to supplement those from our family gardens, from the Skandia area, where the good farms were.
Today, most of those foods would be labeled as “organic” because with very few exceptions, fertilizing was done with manure—we used dried sheep manure at my house mixed with warm rainwater kept in a fifty-five-gallon drum. And we won honors at the Marquette County fair with our produce, too, especially with my dad’s beefsteak tomatoes. Tomatoes of this size and dense, tasteful quality have disappeared from the marketplace, probably never to return. There were, at that time, several good farms in the Green Garden area, along Greenfield Road, mostly. Potato fields dominated.
Presently, like Phoenix, a great farm has sprung up in this area. Well, it didn’t actually “spring up” and it did not start out as great, but it is amazing to me that these two families came to our area and—following some firm principles—have, for more than eleven years, developed an operation whose complexity has not been seen around here.
The name is strange—Seeds and Spores—but it has come to mean quality products. I can remember when the families first came here and began farming. I went to their home where, in a shed adjacent, they had tomatoes for sale. Since childhood, I have been a tomato fan, and I wanted locally grown ones. There was little else for sale, and while the tomatoes were only OK, they were “real” tomatoes—hard to get then and still somewhat hard to get now.
Here are the family members, the players in this most unusual local drama. There are two Jeffs, Jeff Chiodi, his wife Kristen and three small children; then there is Jeff Hatfield, the more public Jeff, his wife Leanne and three children, ages seven to twelve. I especially remember Niikah Hatfield, now twelve, the eldest of that family’s children, when she was an infant in her mother’s arms…beautiful then and now, a young copy of her mother. In addition to the family, there are volunteers, interns and just plain helpers every week.
From a few tomato plants on a rack in a small shed, the farm has grown to produce more than 60,000 pounds of vegetables and fruit last year on seven acres of intensive farming. In addition, they work thirty-three acres of pasture and eighty of forestland. There are two families, as Jeff puts it, with six kids, 400 chickens, twenty-four cows, twenty-five turkeys, twenty-four pigs, three horses, four cats, one sheep and one dog. In addition, they do some logging and run a small sawmill for lumber. Green Garden never saw anything like this before.
Product is sold at the Marquette Food Co-op and at various farmers markets in the area. At times, one can visit the farm on Greenfield Road to purchase produce. Visitors to the farm operation are welcome . . .
—Don Curto
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