I think my weekend at Blue Hill / Stone Barns literally changed my life.
This past Sunday, I turned 29.
As a gift, my spouse Yang Yang decided to take me on a trip to the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. Afterwards, we would have dinner at Blue Hill, Dan Barber’s famous restaurant—the original inspiration for the phrase “farm-to-table.”
Holy crap what is this place
Stone Barns is both an educational center and an incredibly functional compact farm that supplies 60% of its produce to the on-site restaurant Blue Hill. It’s also surprisingly accessible, both from a physical perspective and a philosophical one.
To get to Stone Barns from NYC, you take the MetroNorth for $8.75 from Grand Central Station. You get off at the White Plains station and either rent a car from the local Enterprise or hail a taxi. The Center is then a short ride away, about 15 minutes.
Once you are there, you show them your ticket ($20 for weekend admission) and are then free to explore the farm as you wish. There are a variety of hosted activities, such as picking tomatoes with Farmer Jacob (actual tomatoes that will be used in that night’s Blue Hill dinner!) and observing piglets as they live out their piggyness in the pasture.
For the curious, there are many places to peek around, and very few rules regarding where you can and cannot go. You can take a self-guided stroll through the greenhouses, poke your head into the drying room to check out racks of calendula and bundles of flowers hung from the ceiling, or wander off into the forest in search of wineberries.
We wandered into a flower-drying room at some point.
Afterwards you can come back to the Grain Bar Café and get a bracing cup of iced coffee or eat one of the incredible “Barber wheat” croissants. I had read about these croissants in in Dan Barber’s book, The Third Plate (this was in addition to watching the Chef’s Table episode on Dan Barber, and listening to several NPR interviews—we clearly did our homework), so I was extremely excited to try one of these croissants.
In the book, Dan writes about how his then-baker Alex labored to craft a croissant with both the flaky airiness of a traditional croissant and the rustic full-bodied flavor of whole grain. He achieved this by using Blue Hill’s own variety of experimental wheat (named after Dan Barber, of course), an in-house mill, and plenty of artisanal ingenuity. It worked. The croissant I ate was fucking incredible. So much so that I went back before closing and got the rest of what was left.
The croissant to end all croissants.
The entire time, I was struck by how incredibly fun it was to just run around on a farm, especially one that was so graciously open to the public. We must have walked the entire grounds about 3 times over, and each time we found someone willing to talk to us, answer our questions, or take us on detours to show us something they loved about the farm. You could really tell that people had their hearts invested in this place. Everyone who was there wanted to show us something special about it.
One volunteer, Aysha, led us to a hilltop that had a sound sculpture. Upon closer inspection, we noticed that it was created by none other than Bruce Odland, an old artist friend we had known in college when we were working together on one of his projects. It was an amazing surprise, and not without a tiny air of fatedness.
Bruce Odland’s sound sculpture, one of seven.
As the afternoon wound down, we checked into our hotel, took a nap, and watched cartoons to kill the time. (Daytime TV is pretty much a wasteland, except for cartoons.) Then at 9:45pm we returned to Stone Barns to eat some food.
The next 4 hours were the most surreal hours I had ever spent in my entire life.
It started innocently enough, with all the typical niceties of a hyper-swanky dinner. Hosts scooch furniture for you so you can sit down without touching anything. A massive winelist hit the table with a thud. A guy in a nice suit came to introduce himself and ask us questions. We looked through the little booklet on the table. All it did was inform us our dinner was titled “Grazing, Pecking, Rooting.”
“Grazing? I can show ewe how to do that.”
We didn’t know what to expect, except that maybe we would get to eat some of the tomatoes we had picked earlier that day. So we sat and waited.
Then the food started arriving.
Whole raw radishes, tomatoes and tiny cucumbers, dancing gingerly across a row of sharp pegs. A fuzzy tendril of baby chickpeas still on the vine, which we were instructed to pop open and eat raw. A nest of hay, with four tiny bread needles hidden within for us to search for. Two thin curls of an experimental variety of supersweet cucumber. We ate with our hands, playing with the leaves and poking and tasting with our fingertips before the food arrived in our mouths.
We ate something like this at some point.
Food kept coming. It stopped making sense.
We had leaves that someone found in the forest, dipped in smoked mayonnaise. Yogurt turned into an ethereal dust. Fermented embryo egg shavings. Liver lacquered with shavings of burnt chocolate. Chicken feet deprived of its bones and fried to a crisp. A mysterious ice ball perched on a tin cup of gazpacho. A melon (A squash? What was it?) dipped in honey.
Thanks for the honey, sweetie.
At some point we were given a knife roll filled with a variety of forks and spoons and such. We were told to employ these as required, but to feel no pressure to stop using our fingers. Five or six dishes later, they took them away. I only went through 2 of the alotted 6 forks.
I also had a non-alcoholic beverage pairing. First of all—the sheer thoughtfulness of having a non-alcoholic pairing! Second of all—I pity the fools who only got to drink fermented grape juice all evening. I had a variety of cordials, sodas, infusions, tinctures and who knows what else. I had no idea you could do so much within the category of “refreshing liquid that Tina can drink without passing out.”
Back to the food. It was incredibly cheeky and inventive. At some point we were given a couple of tiny tarts. They were filled with a savory venison paté, and topped with the wineberries that that same deer would have enjoyed... if it were still alive. It was a candid story about the interconnectedness of nature, which you muse over as you devoured it in a single chomp.
Blue Hill: the perfect place to experience Michael Pollan’s quote “You are what you eat, but you are what you eat eats, too.”
At another point, our head waiter wanted to know why it took so long for us to come eat there (since we had clearly done our homework and were kind of a Dan Barber fangirl/boy). We cited financial reasons—after all, if you’re going to be spending upwards of $250 per person on a single meal, you better take some time to think about it. He returned later on in the evening with a small cloth bag and a story about grad students who had dined there before. There were some folks who would eat at Blue Hill three times a week, he said, and then there were these two. As a young couple they had saved up for 3 years, putting money into a cloth bag labeled “Blue Hill,” until it was full. And then they came, and paid for their entire dinner with the cash in that cloth bag. We smiled at the fact that he still had the bag, and that he spoke about that young couple with such obvious pride. Moments later he returned with two slices of “pizza” for us—whisper thin wafers of dehydrated tomato and fermented potato chips floating across a crispy mystery crust, with a side of parmesan foam. Our waiter gleefully pointed out that it was covered in caviar, for our expensive dining pleasure. Verdict: it definitely tasted like pizza, but was unlike any pizza we had ever had before. He wanted to know, with a wink, whether it was better than Dominoes. It was.
At another point in the evening, we were escorted out of the dining room for an evening stroll through the back deck. We met Jackie the grillmaster, who told us about making charcoal from spent corncobs and the bones of the farm animals. She then fed us a bright pink beet hot dog. It was nestled in a grilled bun that tasted of soul-of-corn.
Our host then led us to a former manure shed where a table was set for two. We were given a pair of tiny new potatoes, experimentally bred to be extremely smushable. As a nod to the shed’s origins, and to the supreme importance of waste products in producing good food, the potatoes arrived in a bowl of fired compost. We smushed them ourselves into a pool of green herby sauce.
We then visited a hidden herbal garden started by our head waiter, whose name was Kameron-with-a-K. He clipped some various mints and things and deposited them into a glass teapot.
We returned to our table. At this point we had eaten maybe about 800 things, most of them vegetables. I didn’t mind—I could clearly see Chef Dan’s sustainably-minded philosophy at work here—but there would be. More. Food.
We were given a side plate, a bread knife, a pair of standard utensils, and a fresh napkin. I was struck by the hilarity of it all—the ritualistic signs of starting a new meal, right when I was about to explode from eating so much.
And then we were presented with the first dish of the evening that featured meat at its core: three slender cuts of pork, from the jowl, cheek and belly. All humble and gloriously fatty, and none of which you would consider “high on the hog.” We ate them gingerly, marvelling at the irony that this probably required the most resources out of anything we ate so far to produce, but it was also the one thing we least wanted to eat all night. It was delicious, unctuously fatty and porky in all the right ways, but we were just overwhelmed and needed to stop eating before we hurt ourselves.
I relayed this to Kameron and the next thing we knew, we were eating dessert. It was good. I don’t have any more words to say about it, just that it was good.
Yang likes to take photos of me having moments with food.
This blogpost has gotten very intentionally long. And yet I still haven’t said the main thing I wanted to say, which is that after the weekend was over, and I was riding the train back home, I figured out a lot of things in my head. I have had a very productive first 2 days of being 29.
First, food is inarguably my passion. How it got this way, shrug! But all I felt over the course of this weekend was joy. So much joy. Giddy, stupid, silly joy. During dinner I could not stop giggling. It wasn’t so much the eating with your hands while being super dressed up, or our amicably indulgent head waiter, or the nice personal touches like a private visit to a converted manure shed—it was. The. Food. Just being around food of such high caliber, grown with so much love and optimism, with such a heady vision for the future of how we eat, it made me feel like a seventeen-year-old dizzy with infatuation for her first crush. The simile is cheesy, I know. But also fantastically effervescent, like the parmesan foam we were served!
Second, food like this is extremely inaccessible, and though I propose to help people “connect with their food” through teaching them how to cook via Scratch House, I definitely don’t eat like this in my day-to-day. Neither do my friends. How could we? We live in a world of Hot Cheetos and Takis, and yes I like them too. I stole some from a friend’s open bag the other day. And when I go home to visit, and I still eat industrial pork wrapped lovingly into dumplings by my Chinese mother. I am a product of my time and upbringing. Despite the high-flying sustainable food rhetoric that I very much want to be a part of, I grew up eating industrial. We live in an industrialized world.
Up until this day, I had a hard time accepting both parts of myself. I just couldn’t accept both parts of the world I live in. I wanted to reconcile the two, but I didn’t know how. I thought the solution was to force people to choose. Make people see the light slowly, and eventually they will reject wholesale the Dark Side of eating. Then we will achieve, finally, an equitable food system and rainbow ponies bunny butterfies everywhere.
Doing Scratch House is my own shy, half-assed way of trying to “make people see the light.” But it is awkward. I didn’t want it to be openly about the sustainable food movement, lest I turn folks off. I am aware that there is a lot of “us” vs. “them” mentality in the sustainable food movement (organic vs. conventional; large vs. small farms; real food vs. edible food-like substances), and I personally don’t see this working out very well. It’s a rhetoric that makes you choose sides. It’s very polarizing, too, because of the cost. It calls group identity into question, and makes many who cannot afford it summarily dismiss sustainable eating as an activity exclusive to the privileged classes.
And that’s why Scratch House has been so much about practical cooking lessons—eat healthier, save money, have fun. But skirting the issue is tough, too, because I wanted to shout the real message from the rooftops. Unable to figure out how to say what I wanted to say left me with a lot of tension and questions that I didn’t have the answer to.
Now I know the answer, and it’s not to skirt the issue. I’ve figured out what it is I really wanted to say, what my work really is about.
It’s about accepting that we live in both worlds, the rarified food world of Blue Hill, and the more prosaic food world of $1 pizza and emergency takeout. It’s realizing that most of of us are imperfect, me included. Even the ones who fully aspire to eat clean most of the time fail occasionally. So my work is really about bridging the gap. How can we make it so we don’t have to choose sides? How can we fully take advantage of the fact that we now live in a world that has a place like Blue Hill, a person like Dan Barber, but for the most part many of us will never see it with our own eyes, because we are too busy being hungry, busy and broke? How can we fully inhabit the uncomfortable transition point between a sustainable food system and an industrialized one, while maintaining our forward momentum and eating really, really well?
That’s the question I hope to answer in this lifetime. Changing the dialogue from Or to And.
Thank you, Blue Hill and Stone Barns for getting me there (and to Yang Yang for a very awesome birthday).
