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Will Health Care Reform Pass?
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Nintendo's Mario endures even as games come and go
By Lisa Abraham
Beacon Journal food writer
POSTED: 12:16 p.m. EDT, Jul 07, 2009
HURON: The distribution room reads like a Who's Who among famous chefs and restaurants — Charlie Trotter, Bobby Flay, Ritz Carltons across the map.
Box after box of vegetables, perfectly packaged, thoughtfully selected, carefully grown, head across conveyor belts for shipping.
Television chef Lee Anne Wong's cartons of brightly colored heirloom tomatoes await their packing box.
Even the cold packs placed in the boxes to keep these veggies fresh on their journey are frozen on site to lessen the chance of anything contaminating the precious cargo.
Outside, fields of sandy soil are cultivated the old-fashioned way to control the weeds.
Row after perfect row of heirloom vegetables are in various stages of growth. No pesticides are sprayed here. No combines tramp these fields, which are all given proper time to rest and replenish between crops.
Welcome to the Chef's Garden.
It's a magical place less than three miles from the shores of Lake Erie which, along with its Culinary Vegetable Institute (CVI), has become a haven for haute cuisine.
The Chef's Garden and CVI are the operation of the Jones family — father Bob, brother Bob and brother Lee, who is the front man for the farm and has become known nationally as simply ''Farmer Jones.''
In his signature blue denim coveralls, short-sleeved white shirt and red bow tie, Lee Jones is the public icon of his family's business.
It's Lee who will appear as a judge on an upcoming episode of Iron Chef, for which the Chef's Garden will grow the secret ingredient. It's Lee who goes to the New York parties and gets photographed with the food elite.
He proudly plays a telephone message left several years ago by the late Julia Child, who called to thank him for a shipment of heirloom tomatoes. The voice preserved on Jones' computer is unmistakably Child's.
At the recent Five Star Sensation benefit for University Hospitals in suburban Cleveland, Wolfgang Puck personally asked Farmer Jones to decorate his food station. Make it look like a farmers market, was Puck's request.
Jones, 47, and his wife, Mary, brought in bushels of fresh vegetables for the displays — literally piles of produce. Baskets were spilling over with the yellow flowers that sprout on squash plants before the fruit grows.
Puck's staff took these humble blossoms, once a part of the plant that only peasants would eat, stuffed them with goat cheese, dipped them in batter and fried them, transforming them into an exquisite appetizer.
In much the same way, the Jones family used the squash blossom to transform their farm.
'Huge opportunity'
Throughout the 1970s, Bob Jones was successful. He planted hybridized seed that produced strong, disease-resistant crops of corn, peppers and cabbage.
He was every bit the modern, mechanized farmer. With pesticides to fight the bugs and herbicides to fight the weeds, his fields flourished. Trucks would back up to the farm's loading docks and leave full of produce for distribution to grocery stores throughout the region.
But then the 1980s arrived, with one of the worst recessions the country has ever seen. Farm foreclosures skyrocketed.
The Joneses lost a crop in a hailstorm in 1982 and in 1983, Bob Jones lost his farm. The family watched as their land, their equipment, and their possessions were auctioned off.
Lee was 22 at the time and was forced to return home from Ohio State University, where he was studying agriculture. His parents could no longer afford the tuition.
The family had six acres of land that had been in Lee's name and thus spared from the auction block.
Bob Jones convinced a neighbor to let him lease another 50 acres. The family wasn't even sure they could pay for it, but they knew they had to try. The neighbor agreed and the Joneses started over, growing vegetables to sell at Cleveland-area farmers markets.
They would rise early and fill their cars with produce. ''I would go to East 152nd and Coit in Collinwood. Dad was at West 25th Street,'' Lee Jones recalled. Brother Bob, mom and grandma were all dispatched to other areas of the city.
It was at these farmers markets that Lee Jones met Iris Balin, a Cleveland chef and onetime food editor.
Balin kept asking for squash blossoms.
At the time, no one in Northeast Ohio was eating squash blossoms, Lee Jones recalled. But after a few weeks, he finally brought her some.
Balin, who had trained in Europe, spread the word to other chef friends and it wasn't long before the family had a following among the culinary set.
Bob Jones remembers well the day that Balin came to visit him with two other chefs. It was 1987 and they were proposing an idea for a farm that would cater to cooks — growing specialty ingredients, not the mass-produced stock of grocery stores.
He asked them how many other farmers they had proposed the idea to. ''Fifteen,'' they replied. At that, Jones said, ''We'll do it.''
Bob Jones said he knew if that others had rejected the idea, there was a chance for him to build a niche. And he had little left to lose.
''It was a real leap,'' he said. ''But it was also a huge opportunity.''
Old practices unearthed
The transformation took place over the course of years. The Chef's Garden today is at once a tribute to the past, and an embodiment of the present and future.
Their growing practices are decidedly old-school. They plant fields of rye to allow time for nutrients to enrich the soil between crops. They use heirloom seeds that aren't grown in many places. ''We don't grow anything new. We just grow old things that people have forgotten about,'' said Bob Jones, 68.
At the same time, the farm embraces computerization to help to make their jobs easier. Each planted row bears a sign with a bar code that tracks the planting's life from seed to chef.
They breed their own worms to work in their fields and operate their own lab, where testing is done to determine what the soil needs to produce the strongest most disease-resistant plants on their own.
They sort through thousands of seeds to find the heaviest, because their research shows that heavier seeds produce stronger plants. Insects attack weak plants. Really strong plants grown in really healthy soil have no need for pesticides, Lee Jones said.
He is a believer in the ''you are what you eat'' philosophy.
As factory farming with its genetically modified plants, herbicides and pesticides began to take over the U.S. after World War II, the incidence of kidney, liver, and heart disease increased more than 3,000 percent in the American public, he says.
The family goal, Lee Jones said, ''is to get as good as the growers were 100 years ago.''
Unique garden
For the culinary world, the Chef's Garden is a dream come true.
Mention the name and a chef is likely to go weak in the knees, gushing over its wide variety of heirloom tomatoes, its popcorn shoots (sprouts of corn) or its micro-greens — baby lettuces picked so young and tender they're harvested with scissors like herbs.
Scot Jones, executive chef for Akron's VegiTerranean and Canton's Fedeli restaurants, gets a shipment about twice a month. From exotic mushrooms to heirloom tomatoes, potatoes and other root vegetables, he said the Chef's Garden offers produce he can't find elsewhere.
''They grow baby lettuces that you cannot get anywhere else that are just amazing,'' Jones said. ''I've been dealing with Farmer Jones since 1989 when he was selling out of the back of his pickup truck. Their farm is absolutely amazing.''
Scot Jones said he's most impressed with the way the Joneses will allow fields to sit fallow for a year to rejuvenate naturally.
''They don't consider themselves organic. . . . They are, as I like to say, clean green farmers,'' Scot Jones said.
Lee Jones said the family has purposely not obtained a USDA organic certification, believing that its own standards far exceed the government's.
Their methods don't come cheap. But the five-star clientele of chefs, restaurants and resorts all over the globe don't flinch at items that are priced by the ounce, not the pound.
Each week 350 to 400 chefs or restaurants place an order. Some restaurants spend $5,000 a year, some $50,000, Lee Jones said.
The farm grows about 600 varieties of plants each year. Another 250 to 300 varieties are in research and development — only about five of which will be added to the offerings.
Individuals can't purchase their vegetables, although Chef's Garden recently began a partnership with Medical Mutual of Ohio which allows its clients to buy boxes of Chef's Garden produce for $25 through the insurer's client Web site.
Nadia Clifford, marketing director for the Chef's Garden, said they are working on similar programs with Henry Ford Health System in Michigan and Firelands Regional Medical Center in Sandusky.
Culinary center
But chefs are at the heart of the farm's mission.
Everyone at Chef's Garden is aware that the goal is to satisfy chefs. Bill Miller, who packs vegetables for shipping, talks about how he is the final set of eyes before a package is sent.
''If there's a mistake, we just blew their event,'' he said, noting the importance of his job.
Chefs, particularly those from other countries, routinely provide the farm with seeds — things native to their home countries that they can't find here. And chefs are constantly coming up with new ways to use their produce.
Everything is picked to order so that a chef who wants tiny micro-cucumbers with blossoms still attached will have them, while others will be picked a week later for a chef who wants them the size of a pickle.
Lee Jones said each vegetable has something different to offer at each stage of its growth.
''We're constantly seeking the advice our our chef mentors,'' he said.
In homage to their culinary customers, the Jones family in 2003 opened the Culinary Vegetable Institute in nearby Milan, about four miles from the farm.
The center, while available for rental for the public for parties or professional retreats, is really a haven for chefs to rest, visit, cook and experiment. Some chefs come to write their books, others to simply get away from their hectic lives and to reconnect with food.
With a state of the art kitchen, some chefs bring their staffs to train and to develop new menus.
Once every summer, the institute hosts its annual Food and Wine Celebration to benefit Veggie U, its nonprofit arm which takes gardening and plant science into fourth-grade classrooms across the country. This fall, Veggie U will come to Akron Public Schools.
Lee Jones said the institute was his father's idea.
''The original vision was a place for the most forward-thinking chefs to come to have a place for R and D (research and development) or R and R, and to be able to imagine what could happen on a plate. . . . It's really about the synergy of the chef and farmer working together,'' he said.
Lisa A. Abraham can be reached at 330-996-3737 or labraham@thebeaconjournal.com.
HURON: The distribution room reads like a Who's Who among famous chefs and restaurants — Charlie Trotter, Bobby Flay, Ritz Carltons across the map.
Box after box of vegetables, perfectly packaged, thoughtfully selected, carefully grown, head across conveyor belts for shipping.
Television chef Lee Anne Wong's cartons of brightly colored heirloom tomatoes await their packing box.
Even the cold packs placed in the boxes to keep these veggies fresh on their journey are frozen on site to lessen the chance of anything contaminating the precious cargo.
Outside, fields of sandy soil are cultivated the old-fashioned way to control the weeds.
Row after perfect row of heirloom vegetables are in various stages of growth. No pesticides are sprayed here. No combines tramp these fields, which are all given proper time to rest and replenish between crops.
Welcome to the Chef's Garden.
It's a magical place less than three miles from the shores of Lake Erie which, along with its Culinary Vegetable Institute (CVI), has become a haven for haute cuisine.
The Chef's Garden and CVI are the operation of the Jones family — father Bob, brother Bob and brother Lee, who is the front man for the farm and has become known nationally as simply ''Farmer Jones.''
In his signature blue denim coveralls, short-sleeved white shirt and red bow tie, Lee Jones is the public icon of his family's business.
It's Lee who will appear as a judge on an upcoming episode of Iron Chef, for which the Chef's Garden will grow the secret ingredient. It's Lee who goes to the New York parties and gets photographed with the food elite.
He proudly plays a telephone message left several years ago by the late Julia Child, who called to thank him for a shipment of heirloom tomatoes. The voice preserved on Jones' computer is unmistakably Child's.
At the recent Five Star Sensation benefit for University Hospitals in suburban Cleveland, Wolfgang Puck personally asked Farmer Jones to decorate his food station. Make it look like a farmers market, was Puck's request.
Jones, 47, and his wife, Mary, brought in bushels of fresh vegetables for the displays — literally piles of produce. Baskets were spilling over with the yellow flowers that sprout on squash plants before the fruit grows.
Puck's staff took these humble blossoms, once a part of the plant that only peasants would eat, stuffed them with goat cheese, dipped them in batter and fried them, transforming them into an exquisite appetizer.
In much the same way, the Jones family used the squash blossom to transform their farm.
'Huge opportunity'
Throughout the 1970s, Bob Jones was successful. He planted hybridized seed that produced strong, disease-resistant crops of corn, peppers and cabbage.
He was every bit the modern, mechanized farmer. With pesticides to fight the bugs and herbicides to fight the weeds, his fields flourished. Trucks would back up to the farm's loading docks and leave full of produce for distribution to grocery stores throughout the region.
But then the 1980s arrived, with one of the worst recessions the country has ever seen. Farm foreclosures skyrocketed.
The Joneses lost a crop in a hailstorm in 1982 and in 1983, Bob Jones lost his farm. The family watched as their land, their equipment, and their possessions were auctioned off.
Lee was 22 at the time and was forced to return home from Ohio State University, where he was studying agriculture. His parents could no longer afford the tuition.
The family had six acres of land that had been in Lee's name and thus spared from the auction block.
Bob Jones convinced a neighbor to let him lease another 50 acres. The family wasn't even sure they could pay for it, but they knew they had to try. The neighbor agreed and the Joneses started over, growing vegetables to sell at Cleveland-area farmers markets.
They would rise early and fill their cars with produce. ''I would go to East 152nd and Coit in Collinwood. Dad was at West 25th Street,'' Lee Jones recalled. Brother Bob, mom and grandma were all dispatched to other areas of the city.
It was at these farmers markets that Lee Jones met Iris Balin, a Cleveland chef and onetime food editor.
Balin kept asking for squash blossoms.
At the time, no one in Northeast Ohio was eating squash blossoms, Lee Jones recalled. But after a few weeks, he finally brought her some.
Balin, who had trained in Europe, spread the word to other chef friends and it wasn't long before the family had a following among the culinary set.
Bob Jones remembers well the day that Balin came to visit him with two other chefs. It was 1987 and they were proposing an idea for a farm that would cater to cooks — growing specialty ingredients, not the mass-produced stock of grocery stores.
He asked them how many other farmers they had proposed the idea to. ''Fifteen,'' they replied. At that, Jones said, ''We'll do it.''
Bob Jones said he knew if that others had rejected the idea, there was a chance for him to build a niche. And he had little left to lose.
''It was a real leap,'' he said. ''But it was also a huge opportunity.''
Old practices unearthed
The transformation took place over the course of years. The Chef's Garden today is at once a tribute to the past, and an embodiment of the present and future.
Their growing practices are decidedly old-school. They plant fields of rye to allow time for nutrients to enrich the soil between crops. They use heirloom seeds that aren't grown in many places. ''We don't grow anything new. We just grow old things that people have forgotten about,'' said Bob Jones, 68.
At the same time, the farm embraces computerization to help to make their jobs easier. Each planted row bears a sign with a bar code that tracks the planting's life from seed to chef.
They breed their own worms to work in their fields and operate their own lab, where testing is done to determine what the soil needs to produce the strongest most disease-resistant plants on their own.
They sort through thousands of seeds to find the heaviest, because their research shows that heavier seeds produce stronger plants. Insects attack weak plants. Really strong plants grown in really healthy soil have no need for pesticides, Lee Jones said.
He is a believer in the ''you are what you eat'' philosophy.
As factory farming with its genetically modified plants, herbicides and pesticides began to take over the U.S. after World War II, the incidence of kidney, liver, and heart disease increased more than 3,000 percent in the American public, he says.
The family goal, Lee Jones said, ''is to get as good as the growers were 100 years ago.''
Unique garden
For the culinary world, the Chef's Garden is a dream come true.
Mention the name and a chef is likely to go weak in the knees, gushing over its wide variety of heirloom tomatoes, its popcorn shoots (sprouts of corn) or its micro-greens — baby lettuces picked so young and tender they're harvested with scissors like herbs.
Scot Jones, executive chef for Akron's VegiTerranean and Canton's Fedeli restaurants, gets a shipment about twice a month. From exotic mushrooms to heirloom tomatoes, potatoes and other root vegetables, he said the Chef's Garden offers produce he can't find elsewhere.
''They grow baby lettuces that you cannot get anywhere else that are just amazing,'' Jones said. ''I've been dealing with Farmer Jones since 1989 when he was selling out of the back of his pickup truck. Their farm is absolutely amazing.''
Scot Jones said he's most impressed with the way the Joneses will allow fields to sit fallow for a year to rejuvenate naturally.
''They don't consider themselves organic. . . . They are, as I like to say, clean green farmers,'' Scot Jones said.
Lee Jones said the family has purposely not obtained a USDA organic certification, believing that its own standards far exceed the government's.
Their methods don't come cheap. But the five-star clientele of chefs, restaurants and resorts all over the globe don't flinch at items that are priced by the ounce, not the pound.
Each week 350 to 400 chefs or restaurants place an order. Some restaurants spend $5,000 a year, some $50,000, Lee Jones said.
The farm grows about 600 varieties of plants each year. Another 250 to 300 varieties are in research and development — only about five of which will be added to the offerings.
Individuals can't purchase their vegetables, although Chef's Garden recently began a partnership with Medical Mutual of Ohio which allows its clients to buy boxes of Chef's Garden produce for $25 through the insurer's client Web site.
Nadia Clifford, marketing director for the Chef's Garden, said they are working on similar programs with Henry Ford Health System in Michigan and Firelands Regional Medical Center in Sandusky.
Culinary center
But chefs are at the heart of the farm's mission.
Everyone at Chef's Garden is aware that the goal is to satisfy chefs. Bill Miller, who packs vegetables for shipping, talks about how he is the final set of eyes before a package is sent.
''If there's a mistake, we just blew their event,'' he said, noting the importance of his job.
Chefs, particularly those from other countries, routinely provide the farm with seeds — things native to their home countries that they can't find here. And chefs are constantly coming up with new ways to use their produce.
Everything is picked to order so that a chef who wants tiny micro-cucumbers with blossoms still attached will have them, while others will be picked a week later for a chef who wants them the size of a pickle.
Lee Jones said each vegetable has something different to offer at each stage of its growth.
''We're constantly seeking the advice our our chef mentors,'' he said.
In homage to their culinary customers, the Jones family in 2003 opened the Culinary Vegetable Institute in nearby Milan, about four miles from the farm.
The center, while available for rental for the public for parties or professional retreats, is really a haven for chefs to rest, visit, cook and experiment. Some chefs come to write their books, others to simply get away from their hectic lives and to reconnect with food.
With a state of the art kitchen, some chefs bring their staffs to train and to develop new menus.
Once every summer, the institute hosts its annual Food and Wine Celebration to benefit Veggie U, its nonprofit arm which takes gardening and plant science into fourth-grade classrooms across the country. This fall, Veggie U will come to Akron Public Schools.
Lee Jones said the institute was his father's idea.
''The original vision was a place for the most forward-thinking chefs to come to have a place for R and D (research and development) or R and R, and to be able to imagine what could happen on a plate. . . . It's really about the synergy of the chef and farmer working together,'' he said.
Lisa A. Abraham can be reached at 330-996-3737 or labraham@thebeaconjournal.com.
Comments
Click here to post your comments
Sparks, OK
Posted 04:14 PM, 07/09/2009
I just discovered the hidden beauty of Heirloom Tomato Plants. Do not think that you cannot grow these successfully at home and then use them in any number of your favorite or new dishes. I bought my first, and subsequent heirloom plants from Garden Harvest Supply. The tomatoes grow as promised, they are shipped in 3" pots, ready to plant and they taste fantastic. Don't get stuck on the 'good looks' of those hybrid hothouse tomatoes...check out the fantastic flavor of true Heirloom tomatoes. I go here: http://www.gardenharvestsupply.com/category/buy-heirloom-tomato-plants-3-inch-pots
