Friday Food Interview: Andrew Schwerin

TRE: Hi Andrew, thanks for talking with us. What is your current relationship with food?

AS: That’s a pretty broad question, so I’ll just pick one inroad and start there. I worked on a vegetable farm for two seasons after college. Actually, to start back even farther, I worked on my college garden. I went to Dickinson college, and I graduated in 2004, so at that time a movement toward sustainability, good food, all that stuff was starting to grow in the college. It wasn’t just students; it was professors and administration too.

Now, it’s huge there; it’s one of the things the college prides itself on most. But to get back to the point, back then, we had a garden. It was about 1to 1 1/2 acres at that point. To put it in perspective, this is about the size of your average lot of land in boulder, house and all. So we had about 30 outdoor plots, 3 feet by 8 feet, plus 3 greenhouses. One of my favorite things was getting turned on to Asian greens in the early spring and late fall. Bok choi, tat soi, hun tsai tai, autumn poem…all good stuff. In fact, there I really got into salad altogether. Salad wasn’t just this afterthought or this stuff you at because you felt like you “should,” when you have those really fresh greens, like, you can taste the life right in them, it really explodes. I guess if I could pick a beginning for my conscious relationship with food, it would be then and there.

 

I graduated college. I knew that a few of my friends from school had worked for Chip and Susan Planck in Virginia. They run Wheatland Vegetable Farms in Purcellville, which in the Appalachian Piedmont, about an hour from DC. I got down there that summer and worked for them for the full season, until election day, 2004. That was around their 20th or 25th year and they’re still at it, although they’re planning to wind down soon.

 

There were a lot of college students, recent grads and people taking a semester off working there. Chip and Susan wrote this 4 page brochure for prospective workers. The gist of it was, “We work very very hard, in the hot sun and in the rain, and in the peak season, we’ll work harder then you ever imagined was possible. We’ve also had some great conversations, some great meals, and earned pretty well.” That sums up WVF.

They weren’t trying to scare anyone off, just get people ready for what they were getting into. You have to understand that, as good as this change in consciousness is, with people getting into better eating, people’s notions of farming now are so romanticized. They had the occasional person showing up that would think that they were going to frolic in the meadows and play medieval ballads on the lute to goats or some bullshit (I’m not making this up), and they would inevitably have to work, and they’d cry, and quit. So Chip and Susan tried to minimize “situations” like that.

 

It was true, too. I worked some eighty hour weeks and some twenty hour days. I was also pretty happy nearly every day there. Not to sound trite, but I just really believed in what we were doing, and I had awesome friends to do it with. Without that belief, I couldn’t have worked that hard. To me, we fed the city. Our stuff looked awesome at the markets and people lined up for it and paid what we asked them. That’s success right there. And it never got old for me. At nearly every market, I was just blown away how our hard work really shined through in how good our food looked.

You would think that for Susan, after twenty years of this, SHE would be tired, but no. If I had a picture or a video of this spectacle it would all make sense and you’d be shocked, but use your imagination: it’s 7:30 AM, Falls Church VA, and she’s skipping up and down the aisles of our market stall, clapping and yelling about how good it looked.  

 

So, back to food. If it wasn’t apparent from above, let me drill this in to your heads one last time: OUR SHIT LOOKED AWESOME. Rather, OUR SHIT WAS AWESOME. In fact, more than anything, our food kept us working hard. If there was one thing we learned, and only one thing, it was that there is right way and wrong way to pick vegetables. There’s a window when it will be optimum quality. I wouldn’t say a small window, but a window, nonetheless. I know how amazing it can be to see a giant zucchini, but I just think “seedy, tough, yuck.” I’ve also seen these tiny zucchini in packs and I think “useless.” Chip and Susan would check our pick and check for aberrantly sized vegetables, and believe me, if it was poorly picked, they caught it.

 

We were all about that optimum size before it gets seedy and the skin gets tough. That went for any vegetable. I remember I had some squash once that wasn’t picked right and it was tough and seedy! I eat like a beast but I can’t eat stuff that’s past it’s prime like that.

 

DC has an awesome market system. At the big ones like DuPont Circle, there were vegetables, orchard fruit, cheese, meat, prepared food, milk, soaps, and fish. There were a few vendors in each category too. So, we had all of these vegetables, what were we going to cook with them? We got good beef and chicken from Polyface, Joel Salatin’s farm. I think every week we tried a different cut of meat. Flank steaks, rib roasts, all kinds of stuff I never would have thought of, but since he raised the whole beef, he had to sell every part of it, so he made it his business to market that stuff.

I’d been a vegetarian up to that point, but all the hard work, and all the good meat available made me switch sides. A lot of times, people take up vegetarianism against the factory farm system, but why not buy some well raised meat? (TRE: this is exactly the stance I take)

 

You could call it an experimental phase. We made tons of crazy food because we had access to it and we were creative and just curious. Once we made fish stock with fish heads from Buster, the guy at the DuPont market. Tons of good vegetables from our farm or the farm next door, fresh fish heads, good well water. Glory times. We had a neighbor shoot a deer that was eating our vegetables. You want local raised? That thing was from 50 feet away.

We butchered it; gave him one tenderloin and we kept the other. We used some of the bones for soup. Then we had a barbeque and roasted a leg all day. It still had the hoof on it. I think some vegetarian was appalled. The shock of seeing a hoof and knowing it was a real animal that was once alive…or because I was drunk and chasing her around the farm with a deer leg and hoof. If you’re reading this, Samantha Kushnick, I’m sorry.

 

All that stuff left an impact on me. I consider myself a pretty good eater and a good cook. I know how to cook at a lot of different levels: I can cook a few courses for guests coming for a dinner, or I can cook for myself and make sure I eat well with relatively little hassle all week. It’s like going to the gym, in that it may be a little slow to start up, but I have to do it. Sunday will roll around,
and I’ll be all “Alright, let’s get this thing rolling” but then I’ll be cooking and having a blast.

I was reading the Ween page (click on the pic there for the rest of the story/recipe) and Deaner wrote how he likes to get nice and drunk when he’s cooking. It totally reminded me to lighten up Cooking is this energetic exchange. I can bang that shit out just so I can eat, but that’s no fun, and that’ll come through in the product. IOW, it’ll be shitty. If I set aside a little time, get nice and drunk, and have some fun with it, I’ve got some good food for the week.

TRE: Wow, what a complete response! Going back even a little further, what was the food environment like in your house while growing up?

AS: Pretty good, actually. Both of my grandmothers were pretty solid cooks. My Bubbee made all the stuff for holidays: matzo ball soup, tzimmes, brisket, kugel. Heavy Jewish food. We had a high standard for what a “good bagel” was too. Grandma Schwerin was a cook and a gardener up until her really late years. She had an excruciatingly high standard for beans and corn. Plus we’d always have a perfect roasts. We’d stay down the shore every summer, so tons of fish, a few rounds of lobster, clams…my fishmonger just closed his business in August and I was way sad.

 

My mom cooked a lot. Dad grilled a ton. There are some recipes, I wouldn’t call them family recipes since it sounds Hallmark-y, but there’s still some recipes we haven’t stopped using. There’s this pork tenderloin with honey lime marinade that kicks ass. Only now that there’s been this overall change in consciousness, they’re way into shopping for better ingredients. More than I ever thought you could be. In Philly they go to the Clark Park market in West Philly.

 

We’re a product of our times, and we’re not totally in control of our environment, so I ate pretty well, all things considered. I know that especially In those teenage years, there must have been a pretty solid window of about 10 years of slurpees and McDonalds, which probably fucked my head up. I can’t look at the stuff now. It’s not a statement or anything, I just don’t want to eat it.

TRE: So it sounds like even though you did have somewhat of an epiphany moment in college, there has has always been a strong emphasis on food in your life. Do you have anything to say to people who don’t put much time and effort into what they eat?

AS: I’d say, “Quit eating crap!” No…I’m not dogmatic about it. But sometimes I do sit and wonder how people can get through their lives feeling like feeding themselves is a chore instead of a joy (one of my pet peeves is when waiters ask if you’re still “working on that.” Again, like it’s a damn chore to eat their food.) So I’d say to make some space in your day or week to enjoy food. One meal…and start there. Just enjoy it.

Now, nothing good in life is going to get handed to you. Just like searching for a good job, staying in shape, or learning an instrument, it takes some work. You’ll need to put a little work in to eating well. But once you build it in to a part of your lifestyle, you’ll look at how you used to do things and wonder how you got by like that. 

TRE: A little birdie told me that you occasionally pick your own mushrooms. Can you tell us about that?

AS: Sure! I heard about it when I was back on the farm. There was Wachington Mycological Club, WMC. I never got to go out with them, but when I got out here, I found a club, the Colorado Mycological Society. I learned from some people there and then went out on my own. It’s fun. I have this “It’s just a walk in the woods, and if I find mushrooms, it’s gravy” attitude. You know that expression “The hungry don’t get fed?” If you go out all hungry to score, you’ll be sad.

 

The season runs from about June to September. You need rain, so in Colorado, you need to go higher. There are some on the Front Range, but higher is better. Boletes are good - you get a lot of meat on each one and they’re easy to identify. I like to fry them in butter, oil and garlic, and have them on some bread. Then you soak the bread in the oil and it’s great. I usually bring a little stove and a pan when I go out, especially with newbies. that instant reward usually hooks them right into it. It’s funny that in so many other countries, it’s just your hobby and everyone does it.

TRE: Actually, that “bring a little stove” part is a great hook, maybe that’s something I will try next season? I continue to be surprised how pervasive the natural food culture is here in Boulder, is that something you will look for if you ever decide to move?

AS: Not specifically…I feel like it’s become part and parcel with so many other things I’m into, I wouldn’t worry about moving somewhere and not eating well there. On the other side of the coin, I know there are some regions that really have a lot of regional pride in the food they produce: the Northwest and all those fish and mushrooms, the all that well raised meat in the midwest. I think it’s going to be there if you look for it. So I would just be amped to check out what other regions really have.

TRE: Here in Colorado, what do you do after the farmers market has closed up for the season?

AS: I know a few farms, like Abbondanza and Jay Hill do greenhouses and do vegetables pretty late through the season. I’ll do that this year. I have a chest freezer so I freeze a ton of stuff: cherries, peaches, blueberries. But I really crave fresh greens in the winter time, so I’ll hit those farms up. Other than that, I just get what I can at the grocery store.

TRE: Thanks so much for sharing Andrew. Do you have any final words of wisdom or advice for our readers?

AS: I think I’ve got it all out, thank for the talk.