Best Food Writing 2013

by Holly Hughes

  The fine points of apple sex were lost on most US colonists, who planted millions of apple seeds as they settled farms and traveled west. Leading the way was John Chapman, a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed, who single-handedly planted tens of thousands of seeds in the many frontier nurseries he started in anticipation of the approaching settlers, who were required by the government to plant 50 apple trees as part of their land grants. Even if they had understood grafting, the settlers probably wouldn’t have cared: Although some of the frontier apples were grown for fresh eating, more fed the hogs or the fermentation barrel, neither of which was too choosy.

  Every now and then, however, one of those seedling trees produced something special. As the art of grafting spread, those special trees were cloned and named, often for the discoverer. By the 1800s, America possessed more varieties of apples than any other country in the world, each adapted to the local climate and needs. Some came ripe in July, some in November. Some could last six months in the root cellar. Some were best for baking or sauce, and many were too tannic to eat fresh but made exceptional hard cider, the default buzz of agrarian America.

  Bunk likes to call this period the Great American Agricultural Revolution. “When this all happened, there was no USDA, no land grant colleges, no pomological societies,” he says. “This was just grassroots. Farmers being breeders.” As farms industrialized, though, orchards got bigger and bigger. State agricultural extension services encouraged orchardists to focus on the handful of varieties that produced big crops of shiny red fruit that could withstand extensive shipping, often at the expense of flavor. Today, thousands of unique apples have been lost, while a mere handful dominate the market.

  When Bunk lays out his dazzling apple displays, it’s a reminder that our sense of the apple has increasingly narrowed, that we are asking less and less from this most versatile of fruits—and that we are running out of time to change course.

  Exhibit A: The Harrison apple, the pride of Newark, New Jersey, renowned in the early 1800s for making a golden, champagne-like cider that just might have been the finest in the world. But the Harrison, like most of the high-tannin varieties that make good hard cider, disappeared after Prohibition. (The recent hard-cider revival has been making do largely with apples designed for fresh eating, which make boring cider.) But in 1976 one of Bunk’s fellow apple detectives found a single old Harrison tree on the grounds of a defunct cider mill in Newark, grafted it, and now a new generation of Harrison trees is just beginning to bear fruit. It’s as if a storied wine grape called pinot noir had just been rediscovered.

  The usual argument for preserving agricultural biodiversity is that monocrops beg for monolithic wipeouts caused by pests and disease, while diversity gives you more genetic tools to choose from when you suddenly need them. And, indeed, some of the old apples have genes for resistance to apple scab and other scourges of the modern orchard that are proving useful. (Apples require more pesticides than any other crop, and it’s exceedingly difficult to grow modern apple varieties organically.) But don’t discount romance. We still have the option, as did previous generations, of experiencing apples with hundreds of different personalities.

  Bunk’s love affair with apples dates to 1972, when he began farming a hardscrabble plot of land in the town of Palermo, Maine, after graduating from Colby College. That first fall, he noticed the apples ripening all over town, trees that had been started decades ago and were now in their prime, yet mostly went ignored. He began picking them.

  “I felt like these trees I was finding in my town, and then eventually all over Maine and other places, were a gift to me by someone whom I had never met, who had no idea who I was, who had no idea that I was ever going to be.” Over time, he says, “I started thinking, I got to come to earth and have this amazing experience of all these trees that were grown and bearing, and all these old-timers who would take me out into their fields and show me things and take me on trips down these old roads. And I would knock on somebody’s door, and the next thing you know I’m eating with them. It was like gift after gift after gift. And I started thinking, ‘Do I have any responsibilities with this? Or do I just soak it up and let it go?’”

  So he founded Fedco Trees, which specializes in rare heirloom fruits and vegetables, the goal being to make them less rare. When he finds one of these missing links, he grafts it onto rootstocks at the Fedco nursery and begins selling the trees a few years later. Bunk estimates that over the past 30 years he has saved anywhere from 80 to 100 varieties from oblivion. His forensic methods involve everything from studying the depth of the cavity around the stem, to checking the trunk for grafting scars, to poring over old nursery catalogs and historical records. He hangs “Wanted” posters at corner stores in the towns where the apples originated, hands them out at historical society meetings. A typical poster reads, “Wanted Alive: Narragansett Apple. Last Seen in York County! . . . Originated on the farm of Jacob H Harmon, Buxton, Me., in 1873.” Then, beneath a drawing and description of the apple, is the plea, “If You Know the Whereabouts of This Apple Please Contact Fedco.” He dreams of finding once-adored apples that haven’t been heard from in a century, like the Fairbanks (the pride of Winthrop, Maine) and the Naked Limbed Greening (a big green sucker from Waldo County). His current Holy Grail is the Blake, a richly flavored yellow apple so tasty it is said to have been exported to England in the 1860s. According to old catalogs and horticulture books, the Blake was widely distributed in Maine in the mid-1800s, with flesh that was “fine, firm, crisp, subacid,” and a distinctive habit of holding onto its apples after most other trees had dropped theirs. Bunk had been tantalizingly close to a positive Blake ID in December 2011, when an old tree covered with small yellow apples was spotted in a field near Portland, on land that might have been owned by a J. H. Blake in the 1870s, but the tree turned out to be a seedling, the apples didn’t quite fit, and the quest for the Blake continued.

  One of Bunk’s best finds was the Fletcher Sweet, which his research indicated had originated in the Lincolnville area. In 2002, he met a group from the Lincolnville Historical Society. They had never heard of the apple, but they knew of a part of Lincolnville called Fletchertown, which, like many other old villages in northern New England, had since been reclaimed by the forest. A member of the society wrote an article for the local paper saying it was looking for an old apple called a “Fletcher.” A 79-year-old named Clarence Thurlow called the paper and said, “I’ve never heard of a Fletcher, but I know where there’s a Fletcher Sweet.”

  Thurlow led Bunk to the abandoned intersection that had once been the heart of Fletchertown, pointed to an ancient, gnarled tree, and said, “That’s the tree I used to eat apples from when I was a child.” The tree was almost entirely dead. It had lost all its bark except for a two-inch-wide strip of living tissue that rose up the trunk and led to a single living branch about 18 feet off the ground. There was no fruit, but Bunker was interested. A few months later he returned, took a handful of shoots, and grafted them to rootstock at his farm. A year later, both Clarence Thurlow and the tree died, but the grafts thrived, and a few years later, they bore the first juicy, green Fletcher Sweet apples the world had seen in years. “It’s a great apple,” Bunk says. “It has a super-duper distinctive flavor.” Today, Bunk has returned young Fletcher Sweet trees to Lincolnville.

  This is the magic of apples. You can’t take a graft of Clarence Thurlow and grow a new one, but his tree was easily duplicated and returned to Maine life. Today, I can take a bite out of a Fletcher Sweet and know exactly what Clarence Thurlow was experiencing as a boy 80 years ago. I can chomp into a Newtown Pippin and understand what Thomas Jefferson was lamenting in Paris when he wrote to a friend that “they have no apples here to compare with our Newtown Pippin.”

  “It’s about apples and it’s not about apples,” Bunk says of his work. “I talk about the history of apples, but you know what? I’m giving a highly political talk, because it’s about our agricultural heritage.”

 
; And that heritage is in jeopardy. Not only has the industrial food system confined us to a meager handful of apple varieties, but many of the new apples being released, like the SweeTango, are “club apples”—intellectual property of the universities that bred them. Growers must sign a contract that specifies how the trees will be grown and where they can be sold, and they must pay annual royalties on every tree. The days of farmers controlling their own apples may be numbered, and the idea of breaking that chain of knowledge bothers Bunk. “When you and I interact, our ability to be together on earth is predicated by all the stuff that people did for thousands of years. You and I didn’t invent language. You and I didn’t invent clothes, roads, agriculture. It’s up to us to be not just the receivers of what was given to us, but the givers of whatever’s going to come next.”

  By the end of the Common Ground Fair, I had begun to wonder if there were any more apples to rediscover. Freakish spring weather had produced the worst apple year in a century. Many trees had no fruit at all, and fewer people than usual were bringing Bunk their enigmas. We’d seen several Pumpkin Sweets and Roxbury Russets, along with a bushel of seedlings, but not a single tantalizing lead. Then a handsome young couple walked up to us. They looked vaguely Amish, he in a vest and straw hat, she in homespun linens. “Is there one with ‘ghost’ in the name?” the man asked. “We recently bought a place in Gardiner that has some really old trees. The 95-year-old previous owner told us the names. One was something like ‘ghost.’”

  Bunk couldn’t think of any heirloom apple with a name even close to “ghost,” but a month later he made the trip to check out the ghost apple. As soon as he saw the Gardiner house, he grew hopeful. It was a classic old Cape and barn, and there was a row of some of the oldest pear trees he’d ever seen in the front yard. Fifty-foot crab apple trees shaded the house.

  Skinny maples had colonized the land behind the house, but at regular intervals between them, in an orderly grid, he could make out the dark bulk of ancient revenants. It was an old orchard of about 30 trees. Most were dead. Some had gradually lain down on the ground and were now melting back into the earth.

  The Ghost, it turned out, was a Snow, the name misremembered. A bright red Canadian apple cultivated by French settlers in the 1600s, the Snow is fairly common, though it’s best known as the mother of the McIntosh. It is named for its snow-white flesh. “Or ghost-white,” Bunk mused. He identified a brown, fuzzy Roxbury Russet, the oldest apple variety in America, also not an unusual find. He didn’t feel particularly disappointed; most leads go nowhere.

  Then, along the back edge of the old orchard, he came upon a gnarled tree that was at least 150 years old. It held no fruit, but on the ground beneath it lay two dozen golden apples. Bunk picked up one and turned it over in his hand. It was round and firm, with prominent russet dots and a splash of russet around the stem. He knew instantly that he’d never before seen this apple, and, with a thrill, he also instantly wondered whether he had just found the Blake at last. Very few truly yellow apples were grown in Maine 150 years ago. But was the flesh “fine, firm, crisp, sub-acid”? He bit into the apple. Check, check, check, check. It would take a lot more detective work to prove this was a Blake, and he would have to return next fall to get some fruit in better condition, but he had a strong hunch that this ghost of the Great American Agricultural Revolution was a ghost no more.

  EARTH MOTHERS

  By Erin Byers Murray

  From Edible Boston

  As Edible magazines proliferate across America, it’s a natural fit for them to profile a new breed of independent local farmers and artisans. Case in point: this feature by Erin Byers Murray, managing editor of Nashville Lifestyles magazine and author of Shucked: Life on a New England Oyster Farm.

  “Have you seen a sexier tractor?” Karen Pettinelli grinned as she pulled up the corner of a dusty brown tarp to show off her 60-year-old Persian orange Allis-Chalmers cultivation tractor. The trim, olive-skinned 29-year-old is the founder of Terrosa Farm in Barre—and a member of one of the state’s fastest-growing farm demographics: female between the ages of 25 and 40. The US Department of Agriculture’s 2007 census reported that female-operated farms in Massachusetts doubled since 2002 and, says Rick Chandler, the state’s director of agriculture business training, those numbers are still climbing.

  “They’ve inherited a piece of land that no one else wanted or they’re looking for a secondary income. A large number have been career changers,” says Chandler. Many of these women are part of a couple, he says, noting, “It’s a reversal in the traditional family farm. The men are now playing a support role and the women are in charge.”

  But land, income and career are only part of it. Women are flocking to the field for the lifestyle—one that allows for hard work with high emotional rewards. Each of the four farmers included in this piece downplayed the rigorous schedules and task-juggling and focused more on what they personally get out of their own farms: personal fulfillment, joy and, most of all, community.

  “The community is just as important as the food that we’re growing,” says Meryl LaTronica of Powisset Farm in Dover. “We’re not just growing food. We’re growing people.”

  “For me, community was a huge reason to get into it,” says Karen Pettinelli. She’s been farming in earnest since she was 19; the Sudbury native was first inspired by Sienna Farm owner Chris Kurth. “We were scheduled to go on a field trip and Chris came into the classroom saying, ‘There’s going to be a frost tomorrow, we have to pick all the eggplant right now! Who’s going to help me?’ And I thought, ‘Class or that? Count me in.’ So I went to pick eggplant with him. And that was the beginning of the end,” she laughs.

  Farming was never at the front of the suburban girl’s mind, especially since her father had grown up on a farm and hated it. “It was a poor farming family so he went to college and then climbed that ladder. He didn’t want this life,” she says, adding cautiously, “and now, here’s his daughter who wants to farm.”

  Ten years later, Pettinelli says her father is starting to come around. After high school, she worked at Green Meadow Farm for four years, then the Food Project for two. Last season, she reconnected with Kurth to be the assistant farm manager at Sienna; this year, she’ll work there part-time while also running her own farm.

  Terrosa’s first season, 2011, was a rocky one. The original plan was for Pettinelli to farm her family’s land in Mendon, where her father grew up, but a carpet of poison ivy covered the two usable acres and completely derailed her plans.

  “There it was mid summer: I’d bought a tractor, I was all prepared to do a CSA and I didn’t have any land,” she says. Her boyfriend, a 29-year-old pig farmer named Floyd Kelley, stepped in and offered her the use of a few acres of land on a neighbor’s property in Barre. Pettinelli uses it on the simple terms that she pay the owner in vegetables (the owner pays a reduced tax on the land since it’s used for commercial farming).

  Kelley grew up on his family’s working farm where he now raises pigs, sold under the label Burnshirt Valley Farm. Pettinelli uses Kelley’s greenhouse for her seedlings and the two have built a root cellar in the family’s unused dairy barn. Despite last season’s rough start, Pettinelli sold most of her crop at the Wayland winter farmers market and to the restaurant Armsby Abbey in Worcester.

  This summer, she’s creating a “holiday” CSA, offering boxes of greens and other produce to be timed with Memorial Day and July 4th—she’ll start a winter CSA later in the year. “I like the holiday idea because I know what’s in the ground, I know how many members to sign up, I know what they’re going to get, and I know how much to charge,” she says. The traditional summer CSA model can be stressful for a farmer just starting out, she says. “You’re going to do your best but you’re always trying to meet expectations, which are different for every single member,” she says.

  Instead, she prefers to grow crops that get her excited, which right now happens to be a lot of roots and specialty greens like f
ennel leaf, shungiku, mizuna and tatsoi—all of which require more weed control than pest management. Which brings us back to that tractor. The $5,000 piece of equipment was her biggest investment for a reason: “I get to design my own cultivation tools,” she says with a smile.

  For 31-year-old Caitlin Kenney, family has been the single most valuable asset to her Plough In The Stars Farm in Ipswich. Her parents raised her on a horse farm, the Ascot Riding Center, where her father also tended a large family garden—which eventually became the first plot for Kenney’s farm.

  “We spent morning till night outside. I grew up riding, bird watching and just working really hard,” says Kenney. She studied international development with a focus on agriculture at UMass Amherst while working various odd jobs in the food world. “I was surrounded by people who said: To do what you really want to do, you have to do it on your own. You have to be brave enough to take that step,” she says.

  Kenney had several opportunities to travel during her college years and came back understanding that for her, sensory experiences were key. “I wasn’t someone who could go to work, then come home and have home be the place where I found joy. I needed it from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep,” she says. After school, Kenney worked on a few different farms including Seeds of Solidarity and Brookfield Farm, where she says she “learned how to balance a farming life with strength, perseverance, patience and joy.”

  Spending two seasons at First Light Farm in Hamilton gave her the confidence to go back and start a farm at home. The challenge then became convincing her father. “He had seen the land around us be developed or mismanaged for any number of reasons,” she says. He also had concerns about making a farm profitable but she was able to negotiate with him, agreeing to stay within his original 60-by-40 foot garden plot for her first season in 2010, which provided enough produce to supply a 12-person CSA. “I had to show him there was consistency and that I really wanted to do it. From that, he could see I was dedicated,” she says.