Edible North Carolina
and the writing of our own food story
It’s taken time to warm to the idea of telling my own story rather than other people’s stories. For the better part of a decade, I drove my tiny, fuel-efficient car thousands of miles, spending hours listening to others for my own personal love of story. Hearing the experiences that shaped people’s lives and the odd ways they come to their life’s work drove me to pursue a time-starved and financially depressing career as a freelance food writer—for the love of it.
A combination of life experience, encouragement, self-love (a must to believe your own story has value), and the persistent urge to write (which magnifies itself to the point of torment when I’m not writing) has egged me on to this particular space. Plus, a desire to document this life of mine for reasons that Alicia Kennedy, in her latest newsletter, pegged when she referenced Sarah Manguso and her book, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary:
“More than that, I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention. Experience itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.”
Since moving to Old North Farm in 2019, I’ve had the privilege to share my own stories and even had a few of them published. Last year, I wrote a small piece on my baking backstory for Southern Living Magazine (surprise, it’s tied to my relationship with Jamie), and most recently in Edible North Carolina, A Journey Across a State of Flavor, a brand new compilation of essays published by UNC-Press last week.
From the publisher:
“Edible North Carolina documents and shares the vibrant voices and places of North Carolina’s contemporary food movement---an exciting intersection of culinary excellence, creative entrepreneurship, changing populations, historic yet evolving foodways, and a commitment to protect and sustain food resources for generations to come. Twenty new, never-before-published works will be commissioned for this signature collection written by the state and region’s best journalists, farmers, chefs, entrepreneurs, scholars, and food activists.”
In lieu of a more nuanced essay on transparency and privilege that I’m still working on, I thought I’d share an excerpt from my essay for Edible North Carolina, titled “To Be Rather Than To Seem”. If you’re hip to North Carolina things, you’d know that the essay title is the English translation of our state motto, esse quam videri.
Below is a hodgepodge of my full essay which stretches across eight pages:
“As partners, Jamie and I have knit our collective experiences to jointly reimagine a life together. We’ve birthed new businesses in the North Carolina food economy, refined and expanded our roles within our food communities, and actively nurtured an evolving vision–– to create a farm-based life that suits us and serves our community.
Food is where we work. It’s our passion and our livelihoods, and it touches every facet of our personal and professional lives. The path has not been linear, nor has it been traditional. Far from it. Where we are today––juggling the roles of chef, farmer, writer, beverage maker, baker and food entrepreneurs–– is vastly different from where we began.
…In ecological terms, the space where one ecosystem transitions to another is referred to as the edge, and it is said to be the place that teems with the greatest biodiversity. Jamie and I exist in this liminal edge, where we do the work of both farmer and chef, craftsperson and storyteller. It’s a fluid space that moves between the culinary and the agricultural… At the intersection of our passions, community work, and making a living, we have found purpose and meaning in both places.
What we do may sound quaint, and perhaps romanticized, but amid political turmoil, global climate crises, a pandemic, and seemingly endless uncertainty, our work grounds us, connects us to the communities in which we live, and tethers us to an honest living. However big or small, this work affects our local communities for the better. In the literal and metaphorical sense, it helps us get by.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the superficiality that dominates mainstream food culture and how my feelings about food, land, and community have drastically changed since I first got here. Add a pandemic and the dissolution of food media as I’ve known it and a complete reimagination feels requisite. My partnership with Jamie and my experiences up until now have turned lofty theory into practical application. It’s a practicality that can’t be intellectualized over Twitter or conveyed rightly on the pages of a glossy food magazine. At least not in its fullness. I’m learning that a true dedication to food means occupying spaces less visible and, perhaps, more important.
Our move farther into the rural county begs new questions: How can we find common ground with our rural neighbors? How do we live our values in community? How can we make lasting contributions to the local food economy? What does a life in food look like now, and what must be given up to embrace it fully?
After many seasons, we are in a place to live the answers. The vision we had conceived from a distance is front and center, and it’s time to dig in.”
What I love most about re-reading this essay two years after I penned it is that I get to see the evolution of my values and the progress Jamie and I have made. We’ve come a long way, though we are still very much living the questions posed in this essay. We are in the nascent stages of crafting a farm model that serves our community best. We are still researching the history of this land (would you believe there is little written on its indigenous history?!), so that we can steward it better. Like this newsletter and the work of imagining a better world, the game is long. The work is never done.
For now, we plant our faith in the fruit trees and care for the bees who will ultimately care for all of us. We express love in the day to day rituals of growing food and feeding people. That is to say, we hope actively.
I encourage you to purchase the book, especially if you love North Carolina foodways. It’s a compelling compilation full of brilliant thinkers with excellent curation and editing by Marcie Cohen Ferris and KC Hysmith. Photos by the incredibly talented Bax Miller.
ON THE FARM: It’s wild to see what happens when spring hits full stride. The ground temperature warms, the sun shines bolder and brighter, and intermittent spring showers supercharge the plants into an explosion of growth. I marveled at the first leaves on the mimosa tree last week and now the treetop is nearly covered in a full crown.
The most exciting development of late is the addition of honeybees to the farm. We brought two hives to the property last Wednesday. A beekeeper friend, who has kept bees for 40 years, is retiring and has entrusted us with these hives. I’ve toggled between anxiousness and wonder over this development. This is a new venture, and we have a lot to learn. Obviously, we want to do right by the bees and our beekeeper friend. We set them in our budding fruit orchard near the cherry trees and plum trees. Two young hazelnut trees flank the hives and so far, they are abuzz with activity and we have to stop ourselves from staring at them all day.
WHAT’S GROWING: This week, we’re harvesting the first of the sugar snap peas and summer squash, and the first heads of romaine and crispino lettuce are coming out of the field. Baby beets are on their way and the cucumbers have blooms. Won’t be long now.
WHAT WE’RE EATING: It’s been a busy few weeks on the farm and we just had two farm dinners with our friends from Lost Creek Farm. We’ve eaten Lao food and plenty of leftovers from the event–trout mousse on communion wafers, black garlic bagna cauda, buckwheat pancakes, and shuck beans with sour corn. We’re headed straight into salad season and an avalanche of squash.