Stone Barns Center’s efforts to mentor young farmers and a new cookbook celebrating winners of the James Beard Foundation’s annual Outstanding Chef Award are the subjects of recent USA Character Approved Blog posts.
How you gonna keep them down on the farm? As America’s population of farmers ages, this question is keeping some food producers—and consumers—awake nights. The average age of American farmers is now 57. In Medium Raw, Anthony Bourdain makes the point that even if we “bring monstrously evil agribusinesses” to their knees and free up “vast tracts of arable land for small, seasonal, sustainable farming,” we don’t have enough people actually willing to farm. The Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture is working to change that.
Among the people working their 80-acre, four-season farm just outside Manhattan are paid, full-time apprentices, part of their Growing Farmers Initiative. The apprentices learn the practical ins and outs of farming, including finding and financing farm land, from seasoned farmers. The program also includes college internships and grade school and high school field trips and summer camps as well as workshops and conferences for young working farmers. To learn more about Stone Barns and its efforts to train and support the next generation of sustainable farmers, read my latest post on the USA Character Approved Blog.
Celebrating culinary success by the book
With cookbooks, a cooking school and television’s first food show, James Beard shaped the way a generation of American chefs and home cooks thought about food. More than 25 years after his death, the foundation that bears his name continues to do so. Winning the James Beard Foundation’s annual Outstanding Chef Award is a major high point in any chef’s career.
To celebrate its own 25th anniversary, the foundation has just published a cookbook honoring the 21 chefs who have won the award. The James Beard Foundation’s Best of the Best: A 25th Anniversary Celebration of America’s Outstanding Chefs, written and photographed by Kit Wohl, also features profiles of the chefs, a list that is a veritable who’s who of American cooking. To find out more about the cookbook, the chefs—and Wohl’s efforts in creating the book—check out my post on the USA Character Approved Blog.